The Worst Witch 2017 - Tempus Autem Domine
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: AU. Crossover fic. Mildred Hubble is not who everyone thinks she is, but she has always been able to hide it for years. But now, starting with the visit from the Great Wizard, everything everyone believes they know will be thrown out of the window. And now everyone will find out there is more to what they dreamt of.
1. Chapter 1 Life, Death, and Life

Disclaimer - I don't own the Worst Witch... or the thing its crossed over within this story.

Look to the bottom of this chapter - as you read you might start to see clues about what the other fandom is.

I hope you enjoy it.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

Sitting opposite the Great wizard, Mildred wondered what all this was about though she guessed that she wasn't going to like it, not one little bit since she had been specifically ordered/requested to come here to Miss Cackle's office to meet with the Great Wizard.

She had seen the look the wizard had sent her as she'd been transferred in by Miss Hardbroom, remembering her as the girl who had made a fool of herself greeting him outside earlier, but she was so used to the contempt by now it didn't bother her. Truthfully she wondered whether or not she should even reveal what she really was to these people, these stunted little monkeys.

Granted, she hadn't made the best impression by showing up late and saying stupid things to the man, but that was hardly her fault was it? She didn't know much about the Witching world since she'd only been here a short time, but she was close, dangerously close, to making these stupid people realise she was more than a so-called 'non-witch.'

"Miss Hubble, according to this letter," the Great Wizard said in a calm, neutral manner while Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom were to her sides and he held up the letter in question, "you've had a list of misdemeanours longer than a serpent's tail."

The wizard surprised her slightly by handing her the letter while she had wondered what he knew, but she realised he wanted to hear her side of the story. Mildred's eyes scanned the letter for a second, eternally grateful that she could speed read faster than these primitives could ever grasp (while she was more tolerant towards humans than others of her race, she still found them a little bit… foolish, and besides until the humans actually bothered to grow up they would still be primitive in her mind).

The moment she finished she had the whole story. The letter was basically an account of her 'misdemeanours' at the school though it didn't name any particular student, accidents in the potions lab, her failures to master broomstick riding, and her troubles with casting spells, only this was written from an observer point of view. At first she thought Ethel Hallow had written it, but Mildred found it hard to believe the girl who had become her self-proclaimed rival when truthfully Mildred saw her as nothing more than a girl with issues no-one wanted to tackle with had written it, but she decided against it because this letter didn't add up with what she knew about Ethel.

Ethel, while the type to write something like this, would have gone into a bit more detail, she would have put her adopted name in and drew more attention to herself so then the Great Wizard wouldn't be wasting time with these stupid questions. She would also make the letter more scathing under a mask of formality, in comparison whoever had written, this letter made it sound more like a teacher, or a concerned parent, not the work of someone like Ethel.

Oh, she'd probably do it, but the problem with Ethel was she lacked the subtlety to write something like this.

Still, she gave in to her curiosity to find out if the Great Wizard knew more than he was letting on. Without looking at him (she wasn't in the mood to give someone in power respect - she had done that during the War, and look where it had gotten her), she asked quietly, "Who wrote this?"

She didn't really expect the wizard to know, but then again she was still trying to learn more about this strange human society and every day she learnt something new. But this was something she could work around.

"Leaving aside the question of authorship for the moment, are these allegations true?" the wizard asked, and Mildred had to give the man credit, he was clearly good at shifting topics but then again she had been like that herself during her prior two lives.

It was a consummate skill for an experienced politician, to move the subject along when it was clear they didn't have a clue how to answer a specific question.

She gave the show of reading the letter slowly, but truthfully she was trying to work out who had written the letter, but she was trying to work out what to say though she was close to dropping the charade when Miss Cackle spoke up (there was something not quite right with her today, but for the moment she wouldn't say a word).

"Mildred Hubble is a slow learner, Your Greatness," she said, "but with our help, I'm sure she will catch up."

Oh thanks a lot for that, Miss Cackle. Thank you very much. Mildred took umbrage at the remark, remembering how she had been at HER academy, the real academy back home. Her tutors had been impressed with her performance.

But not here.

She still wasn't sure what exactly created the magic these people used, but since she hadn't been much of a tourist since her second incarnation and her third self had been too busy back home to travel much, her experience with Earth and humans, in general, was limited.

Despite that, she had some theories of how the magical world came to be, though she had no intention of telling them that their world could be a consequence of the war.

"Eventually," Miss Hardbroom added quietly breaking through Mildred's thoughts; you had to hand it to HB, Mildred thought to herself, she was good at generating negative waves.

One look into the Great wizards' eyes told Mildred that HB's words had made him even more determined to find out what was going on and to see if there was any truth to the letter. "It's not just a question of ability, its a question of discipline, and the safety of the other girls. I assume your parents know about your behaviour?" he asked Mildred sternly.

Mildred looked up from the letter. "My mum's impressed I got in at all," she said, though she didn't say that 'Julie' was as fake as her own identity, but the humans in the room didn't need to know that.

Besides, the truth of what had happened to her own family during the War….. they were still fresh, and she often wondered even now since her current self appeared so young physically despite her being quite old, and truthfully they were no-one's business but her own.

Miss Cackle clarified the situation helpfully. "Mildred is our first ever student from a non-witching family."

Mildred almost sat back to await the reaction and she wasn't truly disappointed with what she got. The Great Wizard's face turned red and Mildred knew what was coming, she had received the same reaction ever since she'd arrived- his reaction was as predictable as the rest of them. "You mean this girl is not a witch?" he hissed in disbelieving anger.

After almost rolling her eyes at the unimaginative question she had heard time and time again, Mildred turned her head in the direction to where Miss Cackle was standing, wondering what she was going to say but truthfully she wasn't expecting much. The longer she was at Cackles, the more convinced she became that the so-called 'trial' was just a farce, something to convince Mildred that her 'dreams' of becoming a witch was impractical fantasy.

Truthfully she didn't care about being a witch.

She was actually fascinated by the concept that a hidden world was right underneath the surface of human society; she had never come across something like this in her lives. Oh, she had encountered conspiracies to murder or to steal or ancient civilisations, but she had never come across a race of humans who had a power that other humans lacked.

She also wondered if the witching world was a consequence of the War, but there was still time for her to work out the truth but if she was kicked out of Cackles anytime soon, it was no great loss. She was only here to kill time.

But in her mind this world of magic was probably no better than the world created by JK Rowling - some of the Harry Potter books were dull-witted in her mind, and some of the scenarios were unrealistic, but it was the rampant ignorance the so-called Purebloods had towards the muggle-borns which was, in her mind, realistic when she realised that although wizards were supposed to be wise that went hand in hand with how some of the students and many of the teachers treated Mildred herself that made them more human.

What the Great Wizard said next snapped her out of her thoughts as he stood up - whether it was because he felt that his words would have the greatest effect if he stood up, or if he wanted to address the teachers in the room eye to eye, she couldn't tell and frankly didn't care.

"I've always had the great respect for you, Ada, but this will not do. No wonder this school is descending into chaos!"

Mildred held back the urge to snort. Typical, so typical…. blame the nonentity for matters outside her comfort zone.

Unaware of what was going on in Mildred's mind, Miss Cackle said loudly, "This girl has talent!"

But the Great Wizard had a counter argument. "Talent is meaningless unless it is used correctly. Magic in the wrong hands can be extremely dangerous. You, of all people, should know that." Mildred had been following this with an open mouth - she wished she could give off the air of detached disinterest her people were famous for, but she had managed to master a few of the basics but as the years passed and she came across things that her people had otherwise ignored she had pushed detachment aside in favour of emotion until those lessons became meaningless.

Mildred caught the pained look on the elderly witch's face, her eyes closed as she tried to maintain her control.

But the Great Wizard was far from finished. "That's why you removed Agatha's powers after that unpleasantness on Selection Day!"

Mildred was angry - the Great Wizard knew nothing about her, but had decided to base his entire argument on how she wasn't even from his cosy little world and had few troubles comparing her to Agatha Cackle.

"Mildred and my sister are very different people!"

Mildred looked between the two arguing magicians, it was like watching a very bad tennis match taking place before her eyes. She caught Miss Cackle's gaze as the woman added, "Very different."

"That is certainly true, but I think His Greatness is urging us to consider the greater good of the school," Miss Hardbroom said in a hurried manner with well-chosen words meant to soothe Miss Cackle's words, it was clear she wanted Mildred out of the school. Mildred wanted to laugh; Miss Hardbroom was so transparent it wasn't even funny. Why couldn't she actually just say to someone's face if they bothered her? How hard was it to do that?

Huffing, Miss Cackle moved to stand to the side between the Great Wizard and Mildred. "I. Am," she said in a manner that was a little bit too dramatic. "This school needs talented witches no matter what their background," she said looking between the irritated Great Wizard and Miss Hardbroom who was trying to make her see sense, "I believe that Mildred has that talent," she looked down at the still seated Mildred, "I would stake my reputation on it."

Inwardly Mildred winced. Oooh, not good. Don't do that, never do that.

"Would you?" the Great Wizard asked slyly as an idea clearly entered his mind, and Mildred realised what he was going to do. It wasn't rocket science any more than it was transdimensional engineering, she knew what the Great Wizard had in mind. "Indeed," he said, accepting the challenge.

Oh no.

Miss Cackle smiled and turned her smiling face down towards Mildred, but while she smiled back weakly, Mildred wondered what she was going to do next.

* * *

"So who wrote the letter?" Enid asked half an hour later when Mildred met up with her and Maud and took her back to her bedroom. Enid and Maud were sitting on her bed. They'd listened silently and assimilated the news about the letter, and it was left to Enid to ask the logical question.

Mildred stood up from where she'd been sitting on the window sill. "I don't know, but we haven't got time to worry about it now. I've got to study up for this magic display," she said picking up the weighty tome Miss Cackle had given her to study up (she hadn't told anyone about her concerns for Cackle, but unless she received any proof that something was wrong then she'd keep quiet about it).

"Magic display?" Maud repeated slowly, looking at her with sudden worry.

Mildred sighed mentally, she'd expected this reaction. She had never been able to truly master magic; her own mind was geared more towards science rather than something like magic. But there was something about the way these witches cast their spells that she was trying to get her head around.

"Oh, the Great Wizard said I need to prove I belong here," she said, flicking through the pages while trying to find something simple and relatively easy; she knew she'd spoken in an offhanded manner to make it sound like it was no big deal, but she was trying hard to work out ways of getting through this without anything going wrong.

"You've got to do magic in front of the Great Wizard?" Enid said slowly, her expression showing scepticism and worry. Mildred was tempted at that moment to lash out at her, she was becoming tired of the humans' never-ending need to discriminate. She settled on looking scathingly towards her friends - it was strange having friends that cared for her unlike back home (she instantly curbed that train of thought as memories of what happened with Sartia sprang to mind), but she sometimes found their lack of faith annoying and more than a bit disturbing.

"Oh, Millie," Maud said in exasperation as she laid down on the bed, "no!"

Mildred turned around so they couldn't see her when she rolled her eyes.

Humans.

* * *

Okay, so the magic display went wrong.

But Mildred was becoming increasingly convinced that Miss Cackle was trying to kill her. Everyone in the school knew she was terrible at broomstick flight, and yet the woman wanted her to lead a display for the Great Wizard's approval. But as she was outside, clad in her cloak and her hat, she couldn't think of a way she could get out of it so she could find out what was going on. What made it worse was how she was going to be forced to fly on Ethel's broomstick.

Mildred was worried she might damage the stupid thing though truly she was beyond caring at this point. She just wished that she could work out what her main problems with broomstick flying was, then maybe she could really lift two fingers up at HB to make that woman wake up. It was times like this, she had her old air-car. The engine modifications had made it the envy of her classmates….

She was currently holding the broomstick in her hand - it was alright for Maud and Enid to tell her not to panic, but she wasn't panicking, she was worried about what the catch to all this was - as she prepared to lead.

After saying in unison with the other girls "Go Cackles" she spotted Miss Cackle standing close-by and she walked over to the witch, hoping to make her see some sense.

"Miss Cackle, I think you should ask Ethel to fly lead," she said to the woman.

The woman shook her head, "The decision is made. I chose you."

Deciding to try another tack, Mildred tried to say persuasively, "Look I know you're trying to help me, but this is for your sake-."

The smile on Ada's face vanished, and her expression became stone-like and cold. "Do not presume to tell me what is good for me and my school," she said angrily, taking Mildred by surprise. But what surprised her more was how 'Miss Cackle' leaned in close in the classic intimidation stance.

"You will get on that broomstick and you will fly in this display, or else there will be consequences-!"

"Excuse me, but are you threatening me?" Mildred asked, instantly dropping her own facade and letting the persona that she had worn so well back home, the persona that had earned the nickname of "Ice Maiden" because of her cold manner during her years at the Academy, and had exuded so many times over the years.

It seemed that the interruption made 'Miss Cackle' snap back into reality, and she tried to smile. "What? No, of course not. Now," she lifted her hand and began to wave it around as she began to cast a transfer spell, "off you go."

Nothing happened.

Mildred's head shot up and her dark eyes met Miss Cackle's. The woman looked annoyed, but now Mildred knew what was going on, and before the woman could just waltz off Mildred whispered. "It's you, isn't it? I knew something was off with you today, but I never imagined this. It is you…. Agatha," she hissed.

Now it made so much sense. She had thought something was odd with Miss Cackle today, but she hadn't considered it might have been Agatha, what with the Great Wizard here. But now she knew who this imposter was, she could see now why Miss Cackle seemed determined to ruin her school's image.

'Miss Cackle's' tried to smile, but the effect was ruined by the glint of anger in her eyes.

"You're still up to your tricks," Mildred shook her head and looked at the human with unhidden disdain. "Don't you have anything better to do with your short, pointless lifetime than to take over a school?"

It might have been a bad idea to say that, but truthfully Mildred no longer cared about keeping up appearances, and besides she wanted to vent her frustration out on someone deserving for a change; the Great Wizard was certainly a potential target as well, but that would go into trouble she didn't need.

Dropping any pretence of being her twin sister, though Mildred did catch sight of the slight curiosity in the woman's eye at how her life was described, Agatha whispered, "This school is mine-!"

Not bothering to listen to the typical human monologue of 'this is mine and no-one else's', Mildred shook her head, a scornful smile on her face as she realised what was going on. "So that's what you are doing. You're so finite it's pathetic! I'm even more amazed your ancestors bothered to climb out of the trees, you're so repetitive its boring."

"What are you going to do?" Confidence appeared in Agatha's eyes, though Mildred could tell she was annoyed because this little conversation was not going the way she had pictured it. "Tell on me?" she mocked. "No-one would believe you, you have no proof."

As much as she hated to admit it, Mildred knew she had a point. "I'll find a way, and this time hopefully you'll be locked up for life. I don't care how I do it; I will make sure you're locked away in a dark hole for the rest of your life!"

Her words made Agatha angry, but it was only for a second. A moment later, Agatha smiled triumphantly and walked away. Mildred watched her go, not bothering to call out to the others that Agatha was back, and she was worried about the look of triumph. She was right - she didn't have any proof and there was no time to find any herself.

Maud came over to her, and Mildred looked desperately into her friends' eyes (Maud and Enid were better people than Sartia had ever been before she'd discovered that she hadn't been a friend at all, and she was thankful for that). "Millie? Is everything alright?"

"No, it's not alright. Maud, that was not Miss Cackle, that was Agatha!"

Maud's face became exasperatedly skeptical. "Millie," she said slowly. "She can't be."

"Maud, think about it," Mildred snapped (this was not the time to be polite), "she just tried to use a transfer spell, but it didn't work. Miss Cackle, the real Miss Cackle, can use that spell, so why wouldn't it work for her now?"

"Are you sure?" Maud was still uncertain.

Resisting the urge to rant about human stupidity, Mildred gave Maud both barrels and hoped the logic would make Maud realise the truth. "Oh, open your eyes," she said in the same exasperated tone she had used on 'Kirkland' when she told him Drax was conning him, "Maud, we're about to perform an important flying display, on broomsticks, in front of the Great Wizard. She is asking me to lead it; Miss Cackle has given me dozens of chances in the past, but even she would think twice about making me do this. Why would she turn around and drop this on my head? Think about it; she has been using me to make the school look bad, does that sound like Miss Cackle to you?"

Looking into Maud's eyes Mildred saw that her efforts were paying off. Maud's eyes widened for a moment. "Oh, my hat, it's Agatha," she said, pulling on her hat for emphasis. "We have to tell the Great Wizard!"

"Right, and then what else do we say to him, that I'm the reincarnation of Morgana Le Fey? Face it, Maud, he won't believe us. We need to find proof ourselves, we need to find the real Miss Cackle. I think she's in this school, somewhere," Mildred said and she was about to run off without a thought about the flying display - anything organised by Agatha was probably tainted anyway, and besides she would rather run around looking for the real Miss Cackle that play that woman's games - when Miss Drill suddenly called out, evidently seeing them both about to run off.

"Uh, Mildred Hubble," the flying teacher called, her tone reflecting irritation and a bit of disbelieving annoyance at what Mildred was about to do, making Maud and her stop and turn. The flying teacher was walking over, her mouth open in disbelief. "Where do you think you're going?"

Holding out a hand to stop Maud from saying a word about what they'd just learnt - if the Great Wizard wasn't going to believe them, why should Miss Drill? - Mildred sighed, wondering why the teachers had to say the first and second names of their students since it was really irritating. "I was about to take care of a little errand. Really got to go."

It was a stupid excuse, but it was the best she could come up with.

Miss Drill marched over, really annoyed. "We're all counting on you, Mildred, don't let us down, now."

"Uh, no she won't," Maud said, walking over to Miss Drill and made Mildred follow her - surely Maud was not stupid enough to tell her about Agatha, they had no proof.

Maud stood right next to Miss Drill so the two could speak without the others hearing her while the older witch was wondering what was going on. "You see, Mildred was, uhm, just helping me out," Maud said, making Miss Drill look between the pair curiously, "you see I'm having a bit of tummy trouble." She patted her stomach and huffed a bit for emphasis.

Mildred wondered if this would work. Miss Drill was an experienced teacher, after all, so she should see through the obvious lie easily enough and punish Maud. She was surprised when Miss Drill gave Maud a smile. "Why didn't you say, girls? Maud, you're excused. Enid," she shouted over her shoulder to where Enid was standing, "you're in."

After Maud had left them, the girls headed for the courtyard where the Great Wizard was waiting along with the rest of the school, they were surprised when 'Miss Cackle' approached. "Wait, girls," the elderly, though former, witch said with a smile. "Mildred, may I have that broomstick for a second?"

"What's wrong with it?" Mildred asked, knowing instantly that Agatha had something in mind but what could she do without her powers?

"Nothing, dear," Agatha replied. "I just wish to give it and you a good luck potion."

A good luck potion? No, no chance.

"I think I'll be alright," Mildred said.

"I, on the other hand, don't wish for you to suddenly lose control of the broomstick, Mildred. Don't forget we're all counting on you to perform well, the honour of the school depends on you or the Great Wizard will close us down," Agatha said, looking at Mildred with a soft but earnest smile though the effect was ruined by the woman's dark glint in her eyes.

"Take it, Mildred, please," Miss Drill ordered, clearly determined to make a good impression for the Great Wizard. For a moment, Mildred wanted to tell Miss Drill what was going on, but one look into the Flying teacher told her that wasn't a good idea; the woman was rushed on her feet, determined to get them all into the air, and she was in no mood for fairy tales; Maud was able to get away because of her goody-girl nature, but Mildred was far from her favourite student.

She wasn't going to listen.

Mildred took the bottle reluctantly, wondering what Agatha had done. There was no label on the potion bottle to tell her what it really was, but if this potion was something benevolent then she would be really surprised. Once she handed the bottle back, Agatha lifted up her right hand where she sprayed a fine potion towards the broom.

"There now, you and your temporary broomstick are blessed. Good luck, dear," Agatha smiled.

Mildred had to give this woman credit - she may have been cruel and selfish, but she was good at improvisation. But she had no choice but to get on the broomstick and fly, and hope that whatever Agatha had just done, it wouldn't prove to be a fatal mistake…

* * *

After the boring last minute pep-talk from Miss Drill, Mildred and the other girls were in the air performing for the Great Wizard. It seemed to be going well enough, but she was still tense even as she and the others flew around the school. She had no idea if Maud had managed to find Miss Cackle yet, the real Miss Cackle, and had either told her what was going on or was in the process of giving her a rushed account of how much of a mess today had become.

The passing of time made her even tenser, thanks to her alien nature Mildred knew how many seconds had passed since she'd told Maud about who 'Miss Cackle' really was. How had that woman come back anyway? But the more she thought about it, Mildred had to give the woman credit - she was not the type to give up easily.

The good thing was Enid had seen through the absence of Maud, and Mildred had filled her in on the basics before they'd taken flight, but the two girls hadn't had a proper chance to speak.

"How do you know Miss Cackle's really Agatha?" Enid called out to her when they were both in the air and could talk more freely.

"She's got no magic," Mildred replied, but before she could elaborate the broom she was riding on dropped sharply. "Whoa!"

The broom managed to right itself, but Mildred looked at it in fear and she turned back to face Enid. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"The broomstick, there's something wrong with it. The blessing….. that blessing Agatha gave… she knew I knew she was back. I've got to get down, quick-!"

Mildred suddenly screamed when the broomstick rose higher, completely out of control (she was dimly aware of Enid and some of the others calling out to her, but she was going too high up and going too fast for her to hear them properly). At first, the broomstick didn't go too fast, it just seemed to be echoing its true mistress's contempt for her inability to fly properly, but then things went from bad to worse.

The broomstick suddenly shot her to fantastic speeds that made her scream again, a loud, panicked scream (why was no-one doing anything? They were capable of things a normal human was incapable of doing, yet they were just standing or sitting down there, watching as she flew at breakneck speeds. Surely they could see something was wrong? Where was their common sense?) as she sped towards the school.

When the broomstick pulled away at the last minute, she didn't even have time to get her breath back. The broom hurtled away again in a jerky fashion that almost unseated her and caused her to fall to her death, and for a moment she was turned upside down making her look down at the ground with terror.

Mildred no longer had any confidence in getting down, and none of the so-called teachers who were meant to be protecting the students was lifting a finger to help her - even Miss Hardbroom, the one teacher to hold a grudge towards her, would have worked out by now that something was dangerously wrong - and she was beginning to realise nothing could be done. Mildred looked down at the ground, rapidly wondering how far down it was. She didn't want to jump down, not from any height, but right now she would rather break both of her legs than stay up here much longer.

She was too high up, and as she looked around for a rooftop or a spire she could grab hold to as the broomstick flew over the roofs and the turrets of the school, she realised that was out of the window as well; the broomstick was just going to too fast for her to grab hold of anything.

It was the same with trees - the broomstick was going too fast, and worse the broom was going no-where near a tree canopy that she could fall into to break the worst of her fall - sure, she'd probably have a few broken bones, plenty of lacerations, but she would rather have that than plummet to her death so far in the air.

Mildred was worried when the broom veered off and circled the school really fast before it accelerated towards the school wall, and she screamed as she tried frantically to either pull it up or mentally command the broom to stop, but it ignored her. As the broom raced towards the wall, she saw the teachers and she glared at them desperately.

"Get me down from here, you primitives!" she screamed deciding that the time for charades was over, but the broomstick suddenly speeding upwards so fast caught her by surprise, so she had to hold on for dear life as the broom shot up higher, like a rocket. She sped past the clock face and the spire of the weather vane atop the tower, and climbed higher and higher until even she couldn't estimate just how far into the air she'd gone, but luckily she was nowhere near the top of the atmosphere.

The broomstick came to a stop and Mildred took a few deep breaths while her insides tried to get used to not being thrown around any longer. She was about to check her hearts to see how they were doing, though she could feel the double beat in her chest go at an all-time high when the broom suddenly jerked around like it was in the grip of a terrible seizure. To her horror, the handle of the broomstick pulled upwards until it was pointed vertically into the air, and she suddenly slid down the shaft of the broomstick.

NO!

Desperately, Mildred grabbed hold of the handle with both hands while her feet were left to dangle. Rapidly she tried to estimate the tensile strength of the cloak she was wearing as it flapped against her body in the thin air, and she discounted it at once - the cloak was designed for appearance and wasn't truly designed for toughness, so she couldn't use it as a crude parachute. She looked down the dizzying height from where she was all the way to the ground when the broom suddenly cracked and caught fire, burning her hands as the flames shot through the handle to the back.

Mildred screamed as the broom gave way and she fell to the ground, and as she tried to catch her breath the broomstick exploded into burning cinders and she continued to fall to the ground.

As she fell, she looked over her shoulder and she saw something that made her re-think her people's belief that religion was just a primitive load of superstition based on faith.

Enid Nightshade, her yellow lined black cloak flapping with the speed of her own broomstick, was flying towards her. "Get ready to take my hand!" she called out.

Mildred prepared herself mentally, knowing she had only one chance and she had to get it right. She closed her eyes for a second, concentrating on the local time to slow it down a touch so then Enid wouldn't notice a thing, and she reached out for Enid's own outstretched hand.

For a moment the two girls made contact, but as they tried to strengthen their holds there was a flash of light and suddenly Mildred was blown away from Enid by a few feet and she continued falling down towards the Earth.

Mildred's mind raced as she tried to work out what had happened, what magic had been used. She had known the potion Agatha had given her would do anything but bless her, but she'd been coerced into taking it, but it seemed to have repelled her from Enid like two South magnetic poles. She could hear Enid shouting above her, and when the girl tried to grab onto her waist to pull her out of the fall and onto the comparative safety of her own broom she was repelled again.

On the ground, all of the girls were looking up in panic, talking to their neighbours in fear for Mildred's life, though in the background Drusilla Paddock was looking at Ethel in disbelief - she knew Ethel didn't like Mildred and wanted her out, but to go this far…. But then she saw the look of shock on the blonde witch's face, and Drusilla knew, while Ethel could be an actress when the situation needed it, she wasn't capable of faking that look of shock. So she had nothing to do with this.

The Great Wizard meanwhile was looking up into the air, squinting because the light from the sun was making it hard for him to focus properly, as the girl plummeted down to her certain death. He hadn't gotten a good impression of Miss Hubble in the brief time he'd come to know her, but he didn't want her to die simply to prove she belonged here. He turned a glare onto Miss Cackle, noting with surprise and disgust that the serene smile on her face. The Great Wizard simply couldn't believe the woman he had once respected just sat there with a smile on her face as one of her own students fell to her death like they were at a theatrical production!

"What's going on? This is a debacle!"

"I couldn't agree more," Miss Cackle replied, but a woman identical to the witch sitting next to him stepped into view, looking into the air seriously, "wouldn't you agree, Agatha?"

Agatha?

The Great Wizard instantly pulled away from the woman next to him as he looked between the two women, wondering which one was the real Ada and which one was Agatha, but they were both identical, and it was impossible for him to tell.

"Agatha?" The Miss Cackle sitting next to him smiled at the woman, but there was a tremor of surprise in her voice that made what she said next not ring true. "Don't be absurd, I'm Ada."

"No, I'm Ada."

The Great Wizard was getting more and more alarmed - there was a girl falling to her death and these two were playing a game. "Well, there's an easy way to settle this; Agatha has no powers. Whichever one of you is the true Headmistress, save that girl."

As he finished his order, the Great Wizard saw the petulant look on the face of the woman next to him.

The newly arrived Miss Cackle held out her hand to create a wave of magic to stop Mildred's fall, but when the magic reached the girl there was a flash and the girl continued on her screaming descent.

Real fear crossed the features of the woman the Wizard was convinced was Ada, and she called to her teachers. "What are you waiting for, help me!"

* * *

About time too, Mildred snarked mentally as the so-called teachers tried to stop her fall, but each time the magic of whatever that potion Agatha handed to her repelled their best efforts. Looking down at the ground as it came hurtling towards her or she was hurtling down towards it, Mildred felt melancholic, she hadn't expected it to end like this.

NO! Her mind screamed. I haven't come through all this to be stopped by a human throwing a tantrum because she didn't get what she wanted.

She spun around so her back was facing the ground - no matter how she looked at it, she was going to hit the ground anyway, but she didn't want to feel any pain to her face and lose consciousness, although the back of her skull would probably be smashed.

She smiled as she saw Enid flying down towards her, knowing she couldn't do anything to stop her fall, but trying nonetheless. Enid may have made her realise she could be a child, albeit a human child, but it had been fun to be near her. What was better and warmed her both of her hearts was Enid refused to give up trying.

Then she felt an almighty crash as she impacted on the ground, and she felt the ripples of pain which hit her like a giant hand swatting her aside. She felt the ground cave in under her head and her back, and it felt like hard stone while the rest of her body fell onto the grass. It was so sudden that she went into shock temporarily, but she definitely felt many of her bones break like twigs. She gasped as she felt one of her damaged ribs tear into one of her lungs, and she knew from her studies of physics the kinetic energy of her fall had just turned into mechanical energy, generating fractures and tears as it went through her body.

The shock was so sudden that she couldn't tell what was broken in her body, she felt numb all over but she knew that the damage was too great. She wouldn't be surprised if her spine had just broken in multiple places, to say nothing of her skull. She couldn't move.

She lay there and then she felt it, a tell-tale burn in her chest….

"It's started," she whispered; it was hardly a shock to her, she'd known this would happen to her when she felt the potion inside her, whatever it was (she was so going to have to improve her knowledge of the magical spells out there, but there were bound to be lists of potions and spells out there that the Cackle's library didn't have room to cover) repel the attempts to save her kick in. She was just relieved it was powerful enough to burn through the potion, or else things would turn nasty.

But the thought of going through with it…. it wouldn't be easy; unlike others of her race, she and several others were better at controlling the change, but going through their lives in such a short order did cause damage to the brain and to the mind, and she had only been in this body for a short time. There was nothing she could do about it in this case, and she couldn't make it to her bedroom. There was no-one to hear her. She closed her eyes and concentrated, she needed to get this one right….

* * *

Maud Spellbody had never been good at running, and yet she raced towards where Mildred had hit the ground, despite knowing what had happened and knowing logically there was no way Mildred could have survived that fall, she hoped that her friend's strangeness could help her.

Thinking about that...Maud recalled that strange feeling when she and Mildred had performed that switching spell, but she had just thought that Mildred had a higher heartbeat than she did, but there was something strange about her body. It had been... odd, being in a body that was not hers. But Mildred had refused to tell her anything else, except she was different. Maud was unsure why she was thinking about that; even the strangest person could not survive a fall like that.

When she had been younger, she had never been good at sports because her body was simply not built for them, yet all that was forgotten when she saw one of her best friends crash into the ground.

Maud realised that everyone else was rushing to where Mildred was lying on the ground as well, and to her left, she saw Enid running alongside her.

"I couldn't save her, she was falling, and I couldn't save her," the other girl kept saying between pants as she ran.

When they got to Mildred, Maud and Enid stopped in horror.

Mildred was lying on the ground, the stone around her cracked and indented with the outline of her body. She had cuts around her face, and it was clear looking at her legs and some of her torso that many of her bones were broken. Maud remembered growing up and hearing horror stories of what could happen to witches and wizards if their broomsticks failed and they fell from great heights, they would suffer terrible injuries. Looking at the broken body of her friend Maud could well believe it.

To their surprise, Mildred was still conscious, and that was more horrifying than seeing Mildred dead.

"Mildred?" she whispered in horror, tears gathering in her eyes.

Mildred smiled weakly. "Hey, Maud, Enid," she whispered, almost as though they were meeting up for breakfast or something mundane than something as horrifying as this.

Maud looked down at her broken friend, tears welling up in her eyes. "Millie, I'm so sorry," she apologised shakily, "I should have been up there with you-."

"Maud, there was nothing you could have done," Mildred interrupted, looking solemnly up at Maud, "I confronted Agatha, and she came back with a potion that repelled the magic or anyone's attempt to save me from falling; you couldn't have done anything any more than the teacher's late attempts to slow my fall."

The mention of the teachers and how they'd been so slow to stop this disappointed Maud, and she glared as they and the rest of the school rushed to where Mildred was lying on the ground, the distinctive red jumper Miss Cackle wore and the long blue robes that represented the Great Wizard among them. Maud turned around so she didn't have to look at them. They had failed to try to save Mildred's life, they'd fallen into Agatha's plan to take over the school, and now her friend was dying.

"What on earth happened?" she asked, looking wildly down at Mildred and at the distraught looking Enid.

Mildred groaned and gasped in agony, making Maud and Enid flinch at the sound. "Long story short; the broomstick bucked out of my control, and it took me on a ride that almost gave me a coronary and then it took me into the air where it burst into flames. Enid tried to stop my fall, but whatever Agatha gave me stopped her, and it stopped any spell from saving me."

Maud understood the logic but she didn't have to like it.

Mildred smiled at her, taking Maud back by the serenity. "Don't worry, I'll be up before you know it."

Maud shared a look with Enid. Mildred was taking this too well. "Millie," she said slowly, wondering if Mildred had hit her head and had become delirious, "you've crashed into the ground, and you've got dozens of broken bones. Even with magic, there's no way to repair such trauma-." She broke off when Mildred let out a coughing fit, and some blood leaked out of her mouth. It made Maud sick just to look at it and one glance at Enid's horrified face nearly did it for her.

"I know," Mildred coughed. "I know, but there's this…..this trick," she screwed her eyes up in pain, "….that happens when I'm about…..about to die... A way of cheating death."

Maud looked down at her, uncomprehending. She glanced at Enid and saw the same uncomprehending look in her face as well. What was Mildred talking about? By that point, the Great Wizard and Miss Cackle had arrived with the others, but Maud didn't want to look at them.

"Except...it means I'm going to...change," Mildred's voice was clear which meant she was lucid but Maud didn't know what she was talking about. "I'm not...going to see you... again. Not like this...," she added with a ghost of her old smile, "not with this face..."

Miss Hardbroom appeared by her shoulder, using a transfer spell to reach her. Maud looked at the teacher hoping she could push the confusion she was feeling over what Mildred was talking about to the side, wondering why she hadn't been around to stop this mess from happening; out of all the teachers Miss Hardbroom was by far the most pro-active, but she'd proven to be a disappointment. Maud pushed that thought of her mind, it wasn't going to help now.

Mildred coughed again, the sound it made was like listening to a chain slicked in oil as it was scraped against metal or stone, and then Felicity asked from behind, "What's that glow?"

Maud looked again and this time she saw it. Mildred's body was starting to glow, and glowing particles of light were swirling around Mildred's head and hands, and she heard a sound that was growing louder, an ethereal sound. It both warmed and chilled Maud to the bone, but she had to look away from the glow; it was as though she had just been placed close to the sun, blinding her.

"Mildred, what's going on?" Enid asked slowly, her voice scared. Maud knew how she felt.

"It's starting," she whispered and she closed her eyes, groaning in agony though Maud had a feeling the groan had something more to do with whatever was happening to her.

"What's starting?" Miss Hardbroom asked.

Mildred didn't seem to hear the question as the glow grew brighter and the particles of golden light began to swirl around her body, glowing brighter as though there was an inner fire inside her while the sound grew louder. She groaned as she clenched her fists tightly, and Maud, Enid and Miss Hardbroom backed away as - whatever was happening to Mildred was glowing brighter and swirling further from her body.

''Why is she glowing?"

"Is she on fire?"

'"Don't interfere," Mildred's voice, weak as it was, suddenly cracked like a whip. "Just... let it happen... I'll be alright in a bit..."

Mildred seemed to explode with the golden light which sounded like a rushing wind like a miniature tornado, making her scream with pain. The force made everyone else scream and jump back. Maud looked on, squinting through the light at Mildred's pained face as she screamed in agony, but she could see something else…..

Mildred was…..changing, the light was too bright for Maud to see what was really happening, so she couldn't be sure if it wasn't all some cruel trick of the light, but she could see something happening, and Mildred…..she was trying to fight it…..

Then the light died away leaving behind a girl dressed in Mildred's clothes and lying in the same spot where Mildred's broken body had been laying when she had crashed into the ground.

But she was not Mildred. She panted on the ground for a second, seemingly breathless, before-

"WHOA!" She cheered, taking all of them by surprise as they gazed down at her from where she was lying on the cracked ground, wearing suddenly torn clothes with shock, but the strange girl merely looked around with a mad laugh before her eyes lit up when she saw Maud. "So, how do I look?"

* * *

Doctor Who. I just had the idea of Mildred Hubble being a Time Lady who had survived the Time War, and I've had it for a while, and she had just regenerated into a new incarnation. I picture the new incarnation to resemble Emily Carey, who played the young Diana from Wonder Woman, and Grace Beauchamp in Casualty. I like Bella Ramsey, but I needed a way for her alien nature to be seen by everyone.

Drax is another Renegade Time Lord who was in the Doctor's class at the Academy, and then he left to become an engineer and a con-artist; in his third incarnation, he joined together with his future selves to steal the device which allowed so many incarnations to interact with each other in the first place.

There's more to come... and everyone learns a few things about the girl they thought they knew.


	2. Chapter 2 The TARDIS

I don't own The Worst Witch or Doctor Who, but I do own this story. I hope you enjoy my Christmas present to you all.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

The strange girl didn't wait for Maud to reply; instead, she just leapt to her feet and staggered around for a moment, wobbling as though her legs were made of jelly. "Ooh," the girl whispered as she struggled to stand upright, "new legs. Oh, it would have been nice if I could have been standing when it happened, that way I wouldn't have to adjust to a new centre of gravity."

The girl continued to wobble around in front of Maud's eyes. The shock had leaked out of the bespectacled girl and now she was looking at the stranger suspiciously as she wobbled about before she stabilised once she gained her centre of gravity. She looked around herself and blinked in surprise as though she was just registering the number of people around herself, but she ignored the curious and frightened expressions and focused on herself. "Let's see," she whispered aloud again as she examined her hands, "five fingers on each hand. Good, it would be odd if I had five fingers on one hand, and seven on the other. I think I've got toes, but they'll need to wait."

The girl weaved her fingers through her hair and dragged some of it in front of her eyes. What she saw made her groan. "Dark hair again!" she muttered. "I was blonde once, what happened? Oh yeah, I remember. Anyway," she pushed the hair back and focused on the rest of her body, and she wriggled her fingers and twirled her left wrist, "I think I've got a slight weakness in my wrist. Well, let's see about that, I don't want anything to go wrong this time around."

The girl closed her eyes for a second, lifted up the hand she'd just been examining, and she took a deep breath and flicked her hand, which began to glow with the same light they'd seen swirling around Mildred, and there was a snapping sound which made the girl wince before the glow faded and she re-examined the wrist. She was obviously satisfied with what she found out because she grinned and nodded.

"And…. there we go. That's the great thing about a nearly full regeneration cycle," she said, "even after the main change there is still enough residual energy to sort out any imperfections in the body before it wears off. Anyway," she grinned at her audience as if only just realising they were even there, "what do you think? How do I look?"

None of the witches and wizards in the crowd knew what to say. They were all stunned by what they'd seen, no-one could muster anything to say despite the questions on their mind. The girl suddenly lost her patience. "And I thought you lot could speak, what are you, deaf and mute?"

"Who are you?" Maud Spellbody whispered, at last, her concern for her friend, wherever she was while this weird girl in front of pranced around in Mildred's clothes, breaking through her speechlessness.

The girl's smile faded somewhat. "Maud….," she tried to say.

"And that's another thing," Maud interrupted, her voice rising in her hysteria. "How do you know my name? Just tell me, who are you?"

"You knew me as Mildred Hubble."

"What?!" Enid joined in. "You're lying." The other girls yelled in agreement, but the girl's face dropped into an impressive scowl.

"SHUT UP!" she snapped, and something in her voice, the sheer authority and power behind the order instantly shut everyone up, but she suddenly lost that authority just after she'd applied it. "I was dying, Maud. My entire body was shattered, I had no way of getting back up again. Don't you remember what I told you, that I was going to change? Well, this is the result. I'm the same, I just look different."

"But it's impossible," Miss Hardbroom said, but the girl immediately snapped at her.

"It may be impossible for you, but for me and others like me it isn't," the girl replied harshly before she sighed. "I'm tired," she whispered, "I've got to get to the Zero Room."

"What's that?"

"Complicated."

The girl turned and started to walk away, but before she could she suddenly cried out in agony that took everyone aback as she bent down. "Ow! These boots!" She turned and pointed a harsh glare towards the potions mistress. "You know something, Miss Hardbroom, if you really wanted me to not feel welcome, there are more subtle ways than making sure I received boots that are tight."

The girl ripped the boots off and threw them away before she left the scene, walking away barefoot except for her socks. Maud looked at Enid, her face uncertain.

"What do you think?" Enid asked.

Maud shook her head. "I don't know. But I know one thing, Mildred did have problems with her boots; they were tight, and what she said about changing makes some sense, but I don't know what to believe."

Enid nodded. "If she has changed she doesn't seem to act like Mildred, the real Mildred," she said.

"Yeah, and what in the name of Merlin is this Zero Room?" Maud asked, knowing her friend didn't have a clue.

"I dunno, but let's follow her," Enid said but before they could even move, Miss Hardbroom instantly blocked them.

"Where do you think you're going?" she demanded.

"We're following her," Enid replied before she moved around the strict potions mistress with Maud, who followed a bit more sedately since she was still learning how to be disrespectful, but she had good teachers even if one of the teachers seemed to have….. disappeared.

* * *

 _The problem with my lifestyle nowadays is I'm here today, gone next week,_ Romana thought to herself as she walked through the corridors of the school - luckily the school was practically empty; everyone had been watching the disastrous display earlier, so she had little trouble moving through the school towards the bedroom. The hard part was getting to the bedroom. Her mind was still recovering from the regeneration, and though she'd had the chance for some last minute preparation, she was still shaken up.

The residual regeneration energy that was still present acted like a high powered adrenaline, and while it had repaired her weakened wrist, it shook up the braincells and it made it very hard for her to concentrate, but all she wanted to do was return to the bedroom, say a quick hello to her cat, and more importantly get to her TARDIS. Romana had no intention of leaving Earth just yet, though it was tempting to just leave the planet behind and travel around for a bit before she came back, she was just too tired.

Besides she didn't want to just leave for an uncertain amount of time, not without telling Maud and Enid.

Thinking about the two girls made Romana lean against the wall and sigh tiredly before she just shook her head and went on her way to the bedroom. Romana knew the two girls didn't believe her, but then again humans never did - they simply didn't have the means of identifying Time Lords before and after regeneration, the only way to get through to them both was to persuade them she was who she was, but she was not sure how to go about that.

The only other Time Lord she knew of who went through this kind of aggravation was the Doctor, but Romana had no idea what had happened to her old friend; she didn't know if he had managed to escape in that confusion when she'd come up with that idea to lock Gallifrey away in that pocket universe when she'd discovered he'd been pushed the edge by the other Time Lords who had degenerated into warlike savages after centuries of being indifferent to everyone else in the universe for millennia, but all she knew was she couldn't hear him.

She couldn't hear anybody else.

Romana was alone. She didn't know if her old friend was alive or dead, but she hoped Rassilon was, the corrupt bastard. All she knew was the rest of her people were sealed away, somewhere and somewhen, and she had no idea where they were.

 _So much to do, so little time_ , the Time Lady thought to herself tiredly as she walked to the bedroom. She smiled when she saw Tabby lying on the bed. She'd gotten a bit of flak from the other girls in the school for having a cat they called useless, but the cat was actually extremely sweet and she didn't really care if he didn't act like the other familiars. She walked over to the cat, who looked at her in confusion.

"It's okay, Tabby," Romana whispered, instinctively falling into cat, relying on her races' ability to speak to any kind of lifeform. She stroked the tabby cat and let him take in a sniff of her, and he quickly recognised her scent.

The cat meowed and Romana chuckled. "You've got more sense than the others put together," she chortled as she stroked the cat, "I'm glad I don't have to spend ages telling you about my ability to regenerate, with your sense of smell you can tell who I am easily."

Tabby batted her hand playfully, and she smiled. Cats, she thought to herself, they were so cute.

"Anyway, I need to recover," Romana said, "I'll be back soon."

The cat meowed and she sighed as she forced herself to pull away and move towards the wardrobe. "Doors," she whispered, and the wardrobe opened up, revealing the TARDIS inside.

Romana was just about to walk inside the TARDIS only to pause when her senses picked up something, a kind of tingle…. And she closed her eyes and leaned on the outside of the TARDIS and turned in the general direction of where the distortion was coming from. She wasn't surprised in the least when she saw Miss Cackle arrive in the room followed by Hardbroom, and the Great Wizard himself (Romana still wasn't sure what to think about him, but she was willing to give him the chance), but what surprised her was before anyone had the chance to speak Maud and Enid arrive in the room.

"Hi guys," Romana greeted them before she turned to face the older magicians. "Miss Cackle, Miss Hardbroom, Your Greatness. How did you know I was coming here?"

"You were heading inside this school, and if you really are Mildred Hubble where else would you go?" Miss Hardbroom reasoned.

Romana lifted an eyebrow. "An intelligent if flawed piece of reasoning. This school is large," she pointed, "I could have been anywhere. Why are you following me?"

"Who are you? What happened to Mildred?"

Romana closed her eyes. "How many times do I need to tell you before you get it into your primitive skulls I am Mildred Hubble? More or less. You see, the name was an identity I took."

"So Mildred was never real?" Maud whispered sadly. To everyones' surprise, the girl turned around and walked over to her. "That's where you're wrong, Maud. Mildred was real."

She looked down at her feet. "The Hubbles were real. I met them shortly….. shortly after….. it was a bad day," her eyes turned downwards with genuine sorrow that was terrible to see, "a lot of terrible things happened. I was injured, badly injured. Every cell in my body was dying. I arrived in the second world war. Julie and Mildred Hubble were trying to survive in London, the German bombs falling on the city…. and yet they took a dying stranger in. They tried to take care of me, but I was dying. I knew I would regenerate… In the end, they both died, but I swore to honour their memories. So when I did regenerate, I would take on this sweet little girls' appearance, and keep her memory alive. So, she was real. I adapted some traits of her personality, and for the last two hundred years I'd kept that appearance."

"Two hundred years?" Miss Hardbroom scoffed even as the Great Wizard growled. "I don't know what you're playing at, but you cannot be two hundred years old?"

Romana couldn't help it; she burst out laughing. "Who said anything about me being two hundred years old? I said I lived for two hundred years in that form, didn't I?" she got out. "You humans, when you are going to see your understanding of time is so limited? Must you be so linear? You're so finite, locked in a single lifetime bound to a dull little world."

Everyone was so taken aback by her annoyance they were silent, so Romana had plenty of time to shrug and remark, "Besides, what's two hundred years when you've lived for nearly a thousand?"

"What?!" Hardbroom barked, glaring at the girl and she stormed over to her, trying to intimidate her with her glare, but Enid and Maud were almost amused when they both saw the girl looked indifferent like she had seen worse. "Now I know you're lying; I don't know who you are, or what you did to Mildred Hubble, but I know you are lying. Now, tell us the truth, or,"

"Or you'll do what?" the girl asked in a solemn manner that took them aback because she had said it so quietly it was almost a whisper. "Threatening me is not going to help, even your little minds cannot deny that. Why is it so hard for you to believe I am who I say I am? I mean, you lot use a form of energy my people pioneered, and yet you're surrounded by broomsticks, cauldrons, mirrors that can be used to communicate over large distances. Why is it so hard for you to believe I am not just nearly a thousand years old, but I have the power to change my physical appearance when I am injured and dying?"

"What do you mean we use a form of energy your people pioneered?" the Great Wizard asked darkly, his gaze turning furious as he glared at her. "What are you talking about, girl?"

The girl closed her eyes and looked down for a second before she looked up, suddenly looking much older than she appeared. "Come with me," she said, coming to a sudden decision. She turned around and walked towards the open wardrobe in the bedroom. But before she reached it, the girl turned towards Tabby.

"C'mon Tabs," she smiled at the cat, who instantly jumped off of the bed and rubbed against her legs. The girl gestured to the cat as she looked at the magicians in the room with her. "And people out there say there's not a trace of intelligent life on this planet," she said mockingly before she walked into the wardrobe.

Everyone in the bedroom looked at each other, wondering what in the name of Merlin and Morgana was going on, and why the girl had walked inside the wardrobe with the cat. Suddenly they heard a whirring, groaning, wheezing sound and suddenly they found themselves….somewhere else. The Great Wizard and the teachers looked at each other in fear and worry. They knew instinctively whatever they had just experienced was not any form of magical transportation they knew of.

"Where are we?" the Great Wizard demanded as he looked around the room.

Maud meanwhile was studying the room with great interest and caution. The room was large, even larger than Mildred's bedroom. The walls were a gleaming dark blue, which gave the interior a warm feeling. There were circular indentations in the room while the blue walls met a jet black floor.

Along the walls were a number of bookcases laden with books, and there were objects Maud recognised while there were some things she didn't.

Dominating the room was a massive mushroom shaped….thing. It stood in the centre of the room. It was formed of hexagonal panels covered in controls that Maud knew were non-magical. Running through the thing was a long glass tube filled with weird objects.

The girl who claimed she was Mildred Hubble, dressed still in Mildreds' tattered uniform, was standing next to the thing in the centre of the room, holding and stroking Tabby without a care in the world.

Suddenly Maud became angry. She was angry because of what this girl was saying and what she was doing, but before she could say anything, demand to know where they were, the girl looked up from the cat. It bothered Maud that Tabby, who was supposed to be Mildred's familiar, was not scratching this stranger, and yet it gave her nagging doubt. What if the girl was Mildred? What if she was telling the truth?

"You didn't come in," the girl said simply, "so I decided to bring you inside."

"Inside, inside what?" Cackle asked, her voice curious but there was underlying anger at the constant riddles.

The girl didn't seem bothered. "Welcome to my TARDIS," she said, smiling instead.

"Your what?" Maud asked.

"My TARDIS," the girl repeated. "Time And Relative Dimension In Space. This is a time and space machine."

Miss Hardbroom scoffed, but the girl quickly touched a control on one of the panels and suddenly two halves of the wall on the far side opposite the mushroom thing split open. A doorway?

"Go outside if you don't believe me," the girl challenged.

Something…. in her voice…. was compelling, and suddenly Miss Hardbroom followed closely by the Great Wizard himself walked through the door.

The girl turned and winked at Maud and Enid. "Wait for it," she said gleefully. She was enjoying this too much.

Miss Hardbroom and the Great Wizard came back inside, their faces slack with shock. It was even more ridiculous on the Wizards' face.

"Hecate, whatever is the matter?" Miss Cackle asked in concern.

The Potion mistress looked at her friend in shock. "The outside….. myself and his Greatness…. we just….," her voice trailed off unable to complete her sentence.

"What?" Miss Cackle prodded.

The prompt from the elderly Headmistress did the trick. Miss Hardbroom's voice returned to its original brisk tone. "We just stepped out of Mildred's wardrobe, Ada," she said, her tone steely but there was an undercurrent of surprise as if her mind was still trying to think of a way to work out what she'd just experienced. "It is clearly some kind of portal in Mildred's room-," she went on, but she was interrupted.

The girl began to laugh. "You're almost right, Miss Hardbroom," she giggled, "you did step through a doorway, but only a doorway through my TARDIS. You see, my people created ships capable of moving through space and time. But when we did that, we quickly realised our ships were evoking….myths and legends around the lesser races - that's you, by the way - and so we developed the means of camouflaging our ships."

The Great Wizard bristled at the idea of being considered a lesser individual, though he didn't realise at the time Romana was simply addressing his entire race. "We are not lesser, girl!:"

"Oh no?" the girl challenged him, her eyes piercing him like a spear. "Tell me, have you humans encountered intelligent life on other planets yet? Have you joined the interstellar community? No. You haven't. At this point, the lot of you are content with turning your planet, your own world, into a graveyard; plastic littering the ocean, toxic waste burnt into the atmosphere. Don't stand here in my own TARDIS and insult me. As far as I am concerned, the whole human race is nothing more than a bunch of self-righteous, arrogant apes. If you don't believe me, let me show what is out there!"

With that, the girl moved quickly to the controls and the tube lit up brighter as that strange wheezing, groaning sound filled the air and the….. ship….. began to vibrate slightly.

"What are you doing?" Miss Cackle asked, agitated as she looked around the room.

The girl ignored her. Miss Hardbroom flicked her fingers - Maud had no idea what she planned to do - but whatever was supposed to happen didn't happen. The Great Wizard tried to use his own considerable magic, but nothing worked.

The girl turned to face them with a laugh. "Worked out you can't perform magic?" she mocked, her eyes dancing with sadistic glee (Maud was now convinced she wasn't Mildred; Mildred didn't mock anybody). "This is a Type 70 TARDIS. We are separated by the normal laws of physics while we are inside this ship, and now we are in the Time Vortex, we're even further removed. You are in a state of temporal grace; your magic will not work in here."

There was that wheezing groaning sound once more and then the - TARDIS - stopped.

"I demand you let us out," the Great Wizard ordered, glaring at the girl.

Strangely, the girl shrugged her shoulders.

"Doors," she called out. The two halves that led outside suddenly opened. The Great Wizard still maintained his glare on the girl, and he moved for the entrance-

Only to shout in surprise and used his hands to quickly stop himself falling. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!" he roared.

The teachers and Maud and Enid looked at the girl, who was laughing again, hiccuping some of those golden particles out of her mouth while her hands glowed dully with golden light for a moment.

"ANSWER ME; WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

The witches in the TARDIS console room - the eldest and the youngest - went to the doorway. The moment Maud saw it, she nearly fell through the air. Except it wasn't air.

It was space. It was the same black space with distant stars in the nights' sky, only now she was in that sky. Below her, glowing green and blue with life, was Earth.

Her planet.

* * *

Merry Christmas.


	3. Chapter 3 Collapse

Disclaimer - I own neither Doctor Who nor the Worst Witch. I just own this story and the idea behind it.

Feedback would be nice.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

"Can't you tell?" The girl snickered in the Great Wizard's face; Maud was starting to think she had a death wish, though she could more or less understand because she could see something very much like irritation in the girl's face. Maud was good at reading people once she'd gotten to know them, so it was bizarre she was able to tell the girl was irritated by the wizard and his attitude towards her. It also made her wonder if the girl was telling the truth about herself, that she was Mildred.

Maud had just decided to take a wait and see approach when the girl began speaking again. "That is your own solar system, don't tell me you don't recognise it, though you might want to hold your breath; it's a long way down," she said with a smile, but it became a grimace, and she held onto her chest.

"What's wrong?" Enid asked, stepping forward to see if there was anything she could do.

"I need to rest," the girl whispered, "it's still too soon since it happened."

"Since what happened?" Miss Cackle asked, her voice cautious.

The girl sighed. "Since my regeneration happened."

"What is regeneration?" Maud asked.

The girl closed her eyes and let out a noise of something Maud was willing to bet was barely masked frustration. She had learnt very quickly this girl got annoyed very easily. "Oh, this is infuriating," they heard the girl whisper to herself before she spoke up in a slightly louder, clearer tone. "Regeneration is the process where my people can both repair and heal injuries but also to extend life. When I fell from that broomstick, no thanks to your insane sister, Miss Cackle," the girl sent her a look that even Ethel Hallow could not even begin to match and had the elderly headmistress actually take a step back, "it caused a lot of damage to my previous incarnation, so I had to regenerate. That version of me has died, so now I have a new body. That is regeneration. When it happens our bodies are slightly transformed from matter into energy; all organs and bones are repaired and replaced, we can change height, weight, appearance, and even in some cases gender can be shifted. But there is also a slight change in personality."

The girl groaned again and she closed her eyes for a moment before she reopened them again while her audience got to grips with what they'd just been told. In spite of all their magical knowledge, no witch or wizard was capable of doing what the girl had just described. Witches and wizards were able to heal and cure diseases the non-magical people were unable to cope with at this point in time, so it made some degree of sense that the girl would need something like what she'd described in order to come back from the brink.

But was she Mildred Hubble? Had the girl had some kind of power that could-? No, it was ridiculous. In the minds of the Great Wizard and Miss Hardbroom this girl was some kind of imposter, though what she'd done with Miss Hubble, they had no idea. But they had no way of explaining what this….TARDIS thing was doing in Mildred's bedroom, but as soon as they returned Miss Hardbroom planned on vanishing it completely, convinced it was a threat.

Maud wasn't sure what to think because her mind kept going to the point where she'd found Mildred's shattered body, how she kept saying she would be alright and that she would be back on her feet in a moment, and she was going to change. Was this what she'd meant? Maud was starting to see it was possible but she needed more proof.

"If you are Mildred - let me finish," she began when the girl looked even more exasperated, ignoring the reactions from the Great Wizard and her teachers and Enid, "then how did we meet?"

The girl closed her eyes again though whether it was because she was in agony or she was just tired of the never-ending scepticism, Maud had no idea. "You crashed into the balcony of the flat I was living in. You lost your glasses, but I suggested we go to the school. I did badly on the Entrance Exam-," she said but Miss Hardbroom cut across her.

"Anybody else could have gotten that information," the Potions mistress pointed out, and although she hated to admit it to herself, Maud felt the woman had made a very good point.

The girl just looked at the Potions teacher with something very much contempt. "Here we go, the flawed logical blindness I've come to expect from you, Miss Hardbroom. Why don't you just admit to yourself you don't know what's going on? What must I do to convince you people I am who I say I am?"

"Turn back into Mildred Hubble or give her back," the Great Wizard stepped forward, his expression showing he was having a very hard time not losing his temper.

"I can't," the girl replied, her voice slow and deliberate as though she were speaking to a retarded child who was struggling to understand a clear and easy concept. "Regeneration is permanent unless it happens to me again, and where do you think I've put myself? That's ridiculous."

The lack of respect and derision from the girl finally pushed the Great Wizard too far. Storming over to the girl, he loomed over her in order to intimidate her; if he'd had his magical power, Maud had no doubt in her mind the girl would have been transformed into a toad for her troubles.

"Where have you hidden Miss Hubble? Why did you take her, is she in this…this….contraption?!" the Great Wizard waved his hand around the TARDIS control room, struggling to find the right word in his vocabulary while trying to maintain his control.

The girl was not frightened or even worried by the Great Wizard's anger, impressing Maud and Enid since the wizard was well known for having a bad temper when he was pushed. "I should have expected this," she said, her voice nothing but a quiet tone that didn't even mask the frustration she was currently feeling. "Telling humans about regeneration and time travel is like expecting an Ogron to count to ten. Oh, you know what, I'm fed up with this."

The girl turned back to walk over to the console when the Great Wizard, tired of being continually insulted, gave in to his anger and grabbed the girl by the arm and yanked her back. When they could see the girl's expression, Maud, Enid, Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom knew the wizard had gone too far. Even the wizard himself was stilled when he saw the look on the girl's face, and he couldn't help but be staggered by the expression, thinking that no-one should ever have that expression on their face -

"Take. That. Hand. Off. Of. My. Arm. NOW!" the girl whispered very quietly, and very dangerously before she finally shouted at the Great Wizard, the latent threat present.

Frightened even if he didn't want to admit it, the Great Wizard did as he was told. The girl suddenly smiled at them, cheerful once again and she headed back to the console.

"Right, time to get you back to Cackles," she said, and she walked over to the console and she began to make adjustments. "Fast-return," the girl muttered and touched a control. Once more than strange wheezing, groaning noise filled the air before it ended. "And… there we are, we've arrived," the girl said, and she looked at the magicians in the console room with her with a smug smile. "That's the great thing about these Type 70s, they're so easy to use….," her expression shifted, "but then again, there were no old Type 40s for me to take in a hurry."

Maud and Enid shared a look, neither of them knowing what the general difference between a Type 40 or a Type 70 was, but they were still confused and they wanted answers even if Maud herself was starting to wonder if this wasn't Mildred at all. The Mildred they knew would never have spoken to the Great Wizard like that…. or would she? She had after all spoken back and lashed out at Miss Gullet and Miss Hardbroom once or twice, showing she wasn't frightened of either teacher, using logic to make her arguments stick. It looked like this girl was just as unimpressed….

But Maud was still uncertain.

Meanwhile, Romana sighed mentally when she saw Maud and Enid's uncertain expressions. They were getting there, she could see, to realising she was telling the truth even if they found it unlikely. But at that point, the Time Lady was starting to simply not care. She was just sick and tired of all the back talk and the lack of common sense from the humans. She had shown them the solar system to show them the truth of the TARDIS when she had told them she had lived for nearly a thousand years.

But the trauma of the regeneration was getting to her. She needed to rest and she needed to rest now. She had just become so….frustrated and exasperated that she had needed to virtually repeat herself over and over again in a loop she'd decided to simply wait until she'd recovered from the regeneration and just go to the Zero room before she made up her plans from there when she recovered. Once she was over the regeneration and her body 'gelled' then she could make up her mind what to do next.

Without any interest in what the humans were thinking through the telepathic circuits picked up their basic thoughts (there wasn't anything unusual; fear and worry mixed with curiosity which gave her hope she could at least make them believe her), Romana opened the doors to the TARDIS.

"Go on, its safe to go out," she said.

"Where are we?" Miss Hardbroom asked, her dark cold eyes trying to spear her. Romana wanted to roll her eyes at the stupid human who believed she was intimidating, and was blissfully unaware Romana just was not interested in it whatsoever; after her encounters with the likes of Grendel, Scaroth, Davros, the Black Guardian and Rassilon, Miss Hardbroom was not really intimidating enough.

"Where we started," Romana stated shortly; this wasn't the time for an explanation in how the Fast-return switch worked. "The bedroom. We've only been gone ten minutes."

After the humans filed out of the TARDIS, Romana moved to follow, but she soon felt physically tired. She closed her eyes as she felt the tell-tale residual burn of regenerative energy surging in her chest near her hearts. For a moment Romana was tempted to just push the nausea she was feeling to the back of her mind and use willpower to keep herself going. But she quickly decided against it. She was experienced enough with regeneration to know it was a bad idea, and she wished that she had regenerated under better circumstances.

Sighing, she pushed that aside and walked over to the door of the TARDIS, but as she walked over the floor she felt herself becoming weaker and weaker.

Romana had expected her bedroom to be empty by the time she reached the door of the TARDIS, so she was nonetheless surprised when she saw Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom there, along with Maud and Enid. Pushing her concerns for why they were waiting for her, though she guessed it was because they wanted to have another go at interrogating her and finding out who she was. Romana was just relieved the Great Wizard seemed to have gone.

Feeling another wave of nausea that was more overwhelming to her than the previous one, Romana had no choice but to push past it. She wanted to head back into the TARDIS, get to the Zero Room and rely on the null interface within to recover from the regeneration as she'd intended, but the nausea overwhelmed her again.

Maud noticed first. "What's wrong?" she asked curiously when she saw how she could barely stand.

Romana ignored them. She turned around and closed the doors to her time machine sadly. There was no time for her to get to the Zero Room in time. Even if she managed to push this post-regeneration pain aside there was the chance she would just collapse in the corridors of her ship on the way to that deep level in the TARDIS. So she decided to use the next best thing.

Romana closed her eyes, concentrating on her Time Lady training and put herself into a self-induced healing trance…

Maud gaped as the girl suddenly collapsed and with a speed that would have earned her applause from Miss Drill she managed to take hold of the girl before she collapsed. Tabby watched sadly from his position on the bed in the room and meowed.

Meanwhile, Miss Hardbroom was flexing her fingers. She cast her well-practised spell to vanish the TARDIS. The spell impacted the outer shell of the time machine but it didn't fade away.

Hecate reared back in surprise. She tried the spell again, but this time they all saw the forcefield spring up and absorb the spell. Not one to give up Miss Hardbroom tried again. Same thing. The forcefield would absorb the magic of the spell, and the TARDIS would remain where it had been standing the whole time.

Not one to give up, Hardbroom tried again mostly out of fear of what the TARDIS represented to her world, though she had always been unsure and slightly afraid of magic because she had always been raised to see the non-magical ways as inferior to magic so she didn't hesitate to vanish anything she perceived as unnatural, and the TARDIS was as unnatural as they came.

After the fifth try, the Great Wizard snapped. "That's enough, Miss Hardbroom. Can't you see it's not working?"

Hecate turned around in barely concealed outrage but her respect for the wizard stopped her from launching into a scathing tirade. "Your Greatness, this… machine must vanish!"

The Great Wizard sighed. He agreed with her that the machine was unusual and odd, but he was trying to rein in his own desire to vanish the object, and unlike the stubborn witch before him, the wizard was willing to learn from his lessons. He wanted to stay and interrogate the girl and find out more about her before he did anything else.

Besides, he had enough to do at Cackles as it was. He wanted to investigate how Mildred Hubble had fallen from that broomstick, he also wanted to properly deal with Agatha Cackle and formulate a more fitting punishment for her for murder. It was one thing to try to break the Witches code, which was harsh enough as it was, especially when it came to the inheritance section of the code. But murder, especially of someone who was a minor was something else.

But Mildred Hubble….

The Great Wizard still was uncertain of what they had witnessed; that glow, how Mildred had seemed to change until she apparently appeared to become the girl who was currently on the ground unconscious, but he intended to find out. The most worrying thing was everything she had said and even implied had actually rung true in his mind.

"Let's get her to the sick ward," Miss Cackle suggested quietly, her own eyes downcast; the Great Wizard wondered what was going through her mind right about now, but then he mentally shrugged.

"Would you be so kind as to transfer us there, Miss Cackle," he suggested gently.

"Oh, yes, of course, Your Greatness," Miss Cackle waved her hand and they arrived in the sick ward. Their arrival didn't go unnoticed by the nurse and the moment she saw the unconscious form of the girl she immediately jumped into action.

"What happened?" she demanded, pausing only to greet the Great Wizard with an expression of awe, though it was only momentary as she concentrated on her new patient. The Great Wizard didn't mind though he did notice that Miss Hardbroom frowned at the witch before he averted his eyes.

"We don't know," the girl he was sure was called Enid Nightshade spoke up before any of her teachers, "she just collapsed."

The nurse frowned as they got her on the bed. "Who is she?" she asked as she examined the girl's face.

"She claims to be Mildred Hubble," Miss Hardbroom replied, ignoring the start with surprise from the nurse at the girls' 'name', but beyond that, she approached the girl with admirable professionalism. "Can you help us find the truth?"

"I can try," the nurse said vaguely, and she stood up straight and ran a hand over the girl, whose body glowed slightly as the magical scan took place. A sheet of paper appeared in the nurses' hand and she examined it with the air of someone bored with little else to do, but her eyes widened in surprise as she read the sheet.

"That can't be right," she whispered in disbelief, and she re-cast the scanning spell again and received another sheet of paper and her eyes popped when she studied the readings again, and she shook her head. "It is," she whispered.

"Oh, what is it?!" Miss Hardbroom snapped impatiently after they'd been waiting for a few minutes.

The nurse's head snapped up and she glared furiously at the dark potions mistress. "This girl has two hearts, a binary vascular system. Her body temperature is slightly lower than ours, and she has organs that we don't. My scan shows this girl is full of some kind of energy that is similar to magic, but it isn't magical. But the most incredible part of the scan is her brain. It's larger than ours, and there are signs of all kinds of activity that the scan can't identify."

The Great Wizard's party were astonished by the news they'd just received, but they didn't tell the nurse that the scan was wrong since they had seen her perform it twice.

"Two hearts? Could that be why-?" Maud Spellbody whispered before she went quiet, but it was too late.

"What do you mean by that, Maud?" Miss Cackle asked.

Maud blushed but she hurried on with her explanation. "When Mildred and I performed that switching spell on ourselves, I felt something odd about her chest; her heart seemed to be fast, too fast to be normal, but I just assumed it was because she was fitter than I am. But now I think about it," her voice trailed away as she remembered that moment, "Mildred did look….. startled as she adjusted to being in my body, and I remember…. she put my hand on her chest where my heart was in bemusement. At the time, I didn't think anything was wrong… just that she was adjusting to being in a different body."

"That's not all," the nurse interrupted. She didn't look happy she had been interrupted. "She is in a coma, but its not a conventional coma. Its self induced."

"Is that possible?!" Enid asked, stunned.

"For us, no."

Miss Cackle walked over to the bed while everyone was absorbing that influx of information. She looked down at the girl lying on the bed.

"What are you thinking, Ada?" Miss Hardbroom asked curiously as she looked at her friend and employer.

"I don't know. But when she wakes up, I'm going to have a talk with her," Miss Cackle said, about to pull away when she stopped. "Look," she said, pointing down at the girl's body.

The girl's arms were glowing with streams of that weird light, but it wasn't as strong as it had been before. The girls' lips opened slightly and a steam of glittery light swirled upwards before it dissipated.

Enid couldn't help but comment on it, "It doesn't seem as bright as before."

"No, it isn't," the Great Wizard said and he sighed.

The Great Wizard felt completely out of his depth. He didn't know what was happening, nor did he understand what had happened to Mildred Hubble, but he was going to find out.

* * *

Until the next time...


	4. Chapter 4 Romana's Dare

Disclaimer - I don't own The Worst Witch or Doctor Who.

Please leave feedback.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

The moment Romana woke up, she realised the regeneration was over. Yeah, her brain still felt like it had been transformed into a mound of jelly and shaken so fast she could barely think, but she could tell there was only a small amount of residual regeneration energy left in her system. She moved as slowly as she could, knowing if she moved too quickly she might feel worse.

Once she was sitting upright, Romana looked around, and she wasn't particularly surprised to find herself in the sick ward, and she wondered idly about the weird mysteries that bound the universe; prisons were the same, libraries were the same, and sick bays and hospitals were virtually identical. It was one of those weird facts of life she had never worked, and she could not help but wonder if that bastard Rassilon had something to do with it, given he had messed with universal evolution...

Seeing she was still dressed in her previous self's clothes but paying it no mind since she was rethinking her idea of staying on Earth while she stayed on the planet and learnt about magic and was wondering if she should just leave the planet and go back to travelling the universe, Romana wondered what was going to happen now. Her past self had been tempted once or twice to just get out and travel the stars once more, though truthfully being at the Academy had distracted her from the memories of her time in the presidency over those intellectual giants on the High Council who had fought her left, right and centre before the Time War had started.

She closed her eyes as her mind was attacked by the memories…Romana shook her head and got off the bed, only for her to stumble around, and curse both Ethel Hallow and Agatha Cackle for their parts in her regeneration. She cursed the school, she cursed Agatha's plan to get her killed while she made her sister look bad. Romana ground her teeth together, mentally planning to kill the stupid human when she saw her again. No more games.

Pushing the anger out of her mind since it wasn't going to completely help her now, especially if she decided to deal with Agatha on another occasion. There was no doubt the human would try to come back. As she stood up Romana took a few experimental walks about the sick ward for her to get used to her body now it had 'gelled' since her regeneration.

While she was walking around, getting used to her new body properly, thankful that the brief time she'd had before she'd put herself into the coma to recover had been time enough to get some control over her new self.

Romana sighed at the thought of the loss of her past life. The problem with being away from Gallifrey, she thought, is it sometimes makes you careless.

Still, she had liked being her previous self. Being in the body of a child once more had been liberating, though she had always known she could have regenerated herself into such a youthful form, though she knew it wasn't practical.

She had only regenerated into a child in her last incarnation out of memory and respect for the real Mildred Hubble, and she had become so enthralled with being in a body that was so young she had decided her next incarnation would be as young. But now she wasn't so sure because Romana had no idea what was going to happen.

There was no doubt in her mind the teachers, the Great Wizard, and the other girls were going to ask her questions about her identity. Romana knew thanks to stories told by the Doctor about his own regenerations how stubborn humans could be. She remembered how he had told her about how his companions, Ben and Polly, had been so taken aback by his first regeneration, mostly because the Doctor had not really bothered to tell them about it, and it had taken a Dalek of all things to make Ben believe that the second Doctor was still the same person, he just looked and acted different, that was all -

Well, I didn't tell Maud or Enid about regeneration either, did I? Romana rebuked herself as she paced up and down in the sickbay, thinking back to those moments where they had been both so close to her TARDIS. She could have effortlessly shown them inside, told them the truth…

She sighed. It was impossible for her to change the past, it had happened so there was nothing she could do about it…

Just as she was busy thinking about the past, Romana looked up when the door opened and Miss Cackle walked in. Romana instantly noticed the teacher was unsurprised to see her up; it made her wonder if the teachers had placed some kind of spell on her to alert them she was awake or not, but she didn't think it mattered.

In truth, it probably wasn't so bad, Romana thought to herself if she could persuade Miss Cackle she was who she said she was, then perhaps with the support of one of the teachers, particularly one of the more reasonable ones, she might be able to persuade the others...

Alright, granted, she had her doubts about the woman, and how 'Julie' had been forced to endure meeting after meeting after meeting to discuss how her 'daughter' was just not focusing, but maybe Miss Cackle could still be persuaded...

"Hello Miss Cackle," she greeted, knowing from her past experiences both as a TARDIS traveller and as a politician on the High Council that the best thing to do was to keep the greetings short and sweet.

The older looking woman sent her a smile, but Romana winced at how awkward it was. This might not be as simple as she'd hoped.

"Hello," the woman replied back, but she looked like she wanted to say more but she didn't know where to begin. Romana did not blame her.

"I know this is confusing for you," she began diplomatically, "but maybe we can try again?"

Miss Cackle smiled happily then, clearly trying hard to not seem out of her depth. "Yes! That sounds good!"

Romana gestured for the bed next to her own, remembering all too well how the woman liked to take control by pointing out the different chairs. She wasn't going to play the same game now. This time she was going to be the one in control.

Miss Cackle looked a bit miffed, but she accepted the terms and so she sat down. "Thank you," she said with some irony.

Romana decided to be blunt. "Let's get to basics, you don't know who I am and you don't believe I am who I say I am?" she asked.

"You could say that," Miss Cackle remarked dryly.

Romana sighed, "That's the problem with regeneration. It can extend life, heal injuries, and it can even put a temporary stopper on death…. but it does come with so many problems." She looked down at her hands and then lifted her head up, looking solemnly up at the physically older woman. "The biggest, especially when you regenerate in front of humans, is stubborn disbelief."

"Can you blame us? You appear out of nowhere, and we do not know where one of our students happens to be, and you claim to be her."

Romana smiled, thankful she was dealing with Miss Cackle and not her arrogant deputy. At least with Cackle, you had someone diplomatic and tactful rather than annoyingly blunt. "No, I suppose not," she admitted.

Miss Cackle was silent for a moment as she studied the girl in front of her, still dressed in what was left of Mildred's uniform. She was not sure what to think, but after everything that had happened, coupled with her life experience of being a witch… Miss Cackle was just not sure.

She had been around for a long time, but she had seen quite a bit in her life and she knew there were things out there that not even magic itself could explain.

"You keep saying human," Miss Cackle commented, deciding to change the subject, "and you called us lesser races-."

"I was just stating a fact known to my race, Miss Cackle. And if you are wondering if I am not human, you would be right. I don't come from this planet," Romana replied. "I come from an infinitely more advanced race than yours, and if you think I am here to invade, don't worry."

"Who are you? What are you?" Miss Cackle asked, clearly not planning on dwelling on _that_ matter.

Romana was about to answer when she paused, feeling something her temporal senses picked up on, followed by something she could feel and see at the same time. She sighed mentally when she saw, just behind Miss Cackle the forms of the Great Wizard and Miss Hardbroom appear, the light rippling around their bodies.

"If I am to tell you," Romana replied archly, putting on some of her ice queen persona, "then why don't we all chat, isn't that right Miss Hardbroom, Your Greatness? Stop playing these infantile games, they make you look more inferior."

Romana almost laughed when the two humans looked gobsmacked by her revelation. "I can see you both, yes," said, "as a Time Lord I can see through the light aura; your magic may be able to make you both invisible, but even magic has to obey the laws of physics. You may as well appear. I know you are standing…. there," she theatrically pointed at them both.

Miss Hardbroom and the Great Wizard appeared, both of them looked annoyed and frustrated they'd been found so easily. Miss Cackle looked genuinely frustrated and Romana realised there and then the headmistress had not known about this.

"Hecate!" she chided, glaring at her deputy in frustration, but the deputy headmistress did not look abashed. In fact, she looked annoyed they had been found so easily.

"Ada, we had to come, but we decided to cast an invisibility spell to learn what we could about her," the Great Wizard answered for the pair of them, but Romana studied them both with a smirk.

"You could have just asked," the young looking Time Lady pointed out amicably, "my regeneration is pretty much over, and since we here in the sick ward, and nowhere near my TARDIS so you'd try to vanish it again. Don't look at me like that, Miss Hardbroom," she added when she saw the look of surprise on the witch's face, "I had put myself into a self-induced coma to heal from my regeneration, I was not completely asleep. I was aware of everything going on around me. Trying to vanish my ship…. if I had any more proof of how stupid humans are, well I've got it spades. How dare you try to vanish my ship, you stupid little monkey!"

The shift from amiable to hostile surprised the humans, but Romana was not finished. She reached inside a pocket in her gymslip and pulled out a rectangular black object. "Remember this?" Romana taunted the deputy headmistress as she waved the mobile in front of her before the potions mistress could say anything angry back in response to the insult.

Hecate gaped at it, remembering the first day of term when Mildred had called her mother on it. Hecate was not ignorant of the non-magical world, so she knew about mobile phones, the internet, and computers, but she didn't like the devices since they were inferior to magic. "It cannot be the same one!"

Romana smirked and turned the phone on and she swiped the screen and held up the phone so it showed a selfie of her former self wearing her Cackles uniform. "Yes, it is," she pointed out unnecessarily. "It is."

"But I vanished it!" Miss Hardbroom whispered in disbelief. "It should be in vanishment."

"Do you know what vanishment is in a universal manner? I mean, is it a pocket dimension separated sideways in time?" Romana asked curiously, her voice making it clear she wanted an answer.

Miss Hardbroom wasn't sure what compelled her to reply, but when she did she cringed inwardly. "I don't know."

"You don't know?" Romana repeated, glaring at the woman with mocking dislike. "I know you don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if none of you do. That's the problem with you humans, you're so stupid it isn't funny. Do you want to enlighten you? Vanishment is a small bubble in the Time Vortex, the space my TARDIS and others like it travel through. As a result, it wasn't difficult to find the phone and bring it back."

She was lying. It had taken her a short while to find vanishment, even with the TARDIS. After a few days of being exposed to the magical world at Cackles where Miss Hardbroom frequently used the spell to get rid of anything she did not like, it was easy for her to pin down where they went. Romana had made it easier for the teacher. She had shown her friend Maud a few non-magical things like games, pieces of technology, stuff like that and while Maud had the same technophobic attitude HB had, she was a little bit more open-minded than the potions mistress. Romana had staged those moments so she could scan the spell.

At first, she had believed the vanishing spell sent them to a realm she could not access, but it would not have fitted in with the general impression Romana had already of the school and their 'magic.' She had learnt the magical world used artron energy, though in a manner she had not managed to grasp at that moment since she was still learning the ins and the outs while using her TARDIS to study the emissions from the spells so she could work out how they'd done it so she could duplicate it for herself. That type of knowledge could prove useful for her, and it might even help her find her people.

Sure, she had gone through a few detentions because HB was annoyed more "non-magical rubbish" was being brought into the school, but Romana did not care. She had managed to find vanishment and she had opened it up and found her things with her TARDIS. Romana didn't care about lying to the humans in the room with her. She wanted them to wake up and realise she could do things they couldn't.

"In fact, you people use the Time Vortex for a lot of things. You use it for transporting yourself from one place to another in the blink of an eye," Romana went on, "I'm actually starting to think about calling up the rent."

The Great Wizard interjected, snorting in that pompous manner that was clear to Romana, who had centuries over them all, especially in the field of politics that the human did not believe it. "We do not pass through this Time Vortex, girl-," he began, but Romana immediately interrupted him.

"Prove it," she said in a rather agreeable manner that took them all by surprise.

The Great Wizard took a step back, looking at her in surprise. "What do you mean?" he asked cautiously, wondering what the girl was going to get at.

Romana stared at him for a moment and then smiled at him, in a challenging and almost cheeky manner. "I'm going to prove you and every witch and wizard that transfers passes through the Time Vortex," she said, amplifying her Time Lord psychic empathy field slightly to make the Great Wizard do what he was told. "I want you to transfer from where are you are now, to….," Romana looked around for inspiration, and she grinned and pointed at the far wall behind herself and Miss Cackle, and she pointed her finger to it, "to that fall wall."

Once she was finished she mentally strengthened her psychic field to make sure the Great Wizard did what he was told. She mentally smirked with glee and if it wasn't for the people in the room with her, she would have begun jumping up and down with glee around the room.

The Great Wizard nodded, accepting the challenge and believing it was his own decision. "Very well," he replied and made a gesture with both hands like he was an angry football player, but because of her exposure to this world, Romana was certain the gesture had a different meaning.

She grinned when the Great Wizard looked down at his feet as though surprised to find they were still rooted to the same floor as before, and one glance at both Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom showed they were both surprised.

The Great Wizard tried to transfer again, but he was still rooted to the ground. Still astonished, the wizard began to shake and he turned to Romana.

The Time Lady tried to school her face into a more dignified and serious manner, but she couldn't resist the temptation to smirk smugly at the human.

"What did you do?" he demanded furiously.

Romana could not resist the urge to smirk cheekily at the wizard. "Time Lady," she reminded him, "I stopped your little transfer ability into the vortex. My people have a close relationship with the Time Vortex, well I mean we should, we created the Vortex to enable time travel in the first place. Oh, and you can transfer now, I've removed the block," she finished when she'd finished speaking.

Glaring at the Time Lady though Romana could see in the humans' eye the gleam of fear which was understandable since she had basically shown that she could, and would, block off one of his powers without any effort, the Great Wizard immediately tried to transfer…. and materialised in the part of the room Romana had challenged him to transfer to.

Reassured his transfer ability had returned, the Great Wizard stormed over to Romana. "Never do that again!"

Romana shrugged indifferently. There was no chance she was going to throw away an ability simply because the humans did not like it. But she had already made plans to make sure none of the teachers caused her problems. It might make them wake up and spend a few days in the real world after all walking was good for the human body, right?

She sat back down on the bed without a word and looks up at the humans around her without any kind of fear. "Don't you want to know more about me?" she asked. "That's one of the reasons why you are here, Miss Cackle, and why you two came in here to spy on this, right?"

Romana didn't care if she was being rude because it was right, but more than that she had long since wanted to put the humans in their place. She had spent the last few months being told she was worthless by them, and now she had lost one of her regenerations because of the power-hungry ambitions of Miss Cackle's sister. She wasn't likely to forgive and forget in a hurry. No, if she ever met Agatha again she would likely kill her or do something so unpleasant to her the human would never recover from it.

Hardbroom glowered at her, but Miss Cackle quickly interjected. "Why, yes. You were telling me more about yourself."

You mean before your colleague and the Great Wizard interrupted, you mean, she thought scornfully, but she nodded, keeping her irritation from making itself clear and plain on her face. "Yes," she replied simply.

"You called yourself a Time Lord, what are they? Who are they?" Cackle corrected herself.

Romana scratched her head as she tried to think about the best, and the simplest means of answering that question the humans could understand. She wasn't sure if she should tell them about the Time War, but it was bound to crop up at some point, so she decided to get to that painful part of the topic when she got to that point.

But she wasn't looking forward to getting to it.

She sighed when she realised this was going to take a while.

* * *

Until the next time...


	5. Chapter 5 The Time Lady's Story

Disclaimer - I don't own either Doctor Who or the Worst Witch, something you need to know by now.

Believe me, feedback would be more than appreciated.

My thanks to Marcus S. Lazarus for helping me with the Untempered Schism.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

"So, what exactly is a…Time Lord?" Miss Hardbroom asked, her voice drawing out the title with something Romana really did not like the sound of.

The young looking Time Lady was sitting on a bed in the sick ward, while the magicians were sitting on their own chairs; Romana wondered why they hadn't bothered to summon a chair for her, whether it was out of some stupid thought she didn't need one, or because they genuinely didn't think she was worth it, she didn't know.

"That's a good question," Romana had to admit, though it was difficult for her to describe what her race was to humans, it was like asking the Great Wizard and Miss Cackle about what a witch or a wizard was, since she had no doubt in her mind they would give her some grandiose answer which wouldn't matter, though in this case, the problem lay in just how close to home this hit her.

"A Time Lord is basically an academic in theory," she explained, deciding to keep it simple, "we watch the flow of history while making sure no-one causes damage to the fabric of the universe. If anyone changes history, then my people would intervene, and they would repair the damage while punishing the party responsible."

"What do mean by punished?" Miss Cackle asked curiously, and even HB and the Great Wizard took special notice there.

"Their timelines would be reversed if they caused too much damage," Romana explained, "literally they would have never existed. It's temporal law; the Time Lords needed a way of imposing order, and by reversing the timeline of the perpetrator they would ensure they would never be a threat again. It is harsh, but it was necessary. You have to understand, the universe has a finite size, and if there are too many alternate timelines created by the careless actions of incredibly stupid time travellers, the lifespan of the cosmos would be shortened because the false timeline would try to take the place of the primary timeline."

"And that…. machine of yours?" Miss Hardbroom asked, her voice still that cold, sibilant hiss. "What about that?"

"My TARDIS. My people developed them as we developed time travel. A TARDIS is essentially a Time Travel capsule, capable of travelling to any point in the universe at any point in a planet's existence," Romana explained, "they were created after the Time Vortex was established. My people use them for research, observation, and at times, war and combat."

"You called it a Type 70, and you mentioned a Type 40, what did you mean?" the Great Wizard asked curiously, though Romana wondered why he was asking that question, and she wondered if he was purposefully leading her to a specific set of questions but for the time being she decided to cooperate with him.

"TARDISes come in models. The Type 40," here Romana smiled as she remembered her travels with the Doctor in that overworked, ramshackle ship that he favoured so much even if it was on the point of falling to pieces, "was a far older model, though it was considered a standard model; in fact, it was the introduction of the Type 70 which saw the end of the earlier capsules that were still operational at the time and used by veteran Time Lords who preferred older ships compared to the latest on the market at the time. From the Type 50 downwards, all older TARDISes were decommissioned. Rendered obsolete. My people wanted to maintain order by policing our Time Capsules, and the best way of doing that was by introducing new models and decommissioning older ones in order to tighten security."

Romana looked at the magicians with a smile that was full of nostalgia. "I was at the Academy on my planet at the time," she said, "and almost as soon as I graduated I was… assigned to work with one of our renegades to retrieve a cosmically powerful object in order to repair the fabric of the universe. He travelled in a Type 40 that was…missed from the decommissioning program which saw the end of the other Type 40s."

She smiled fondly as she remembered how her original incarnation had arrived in the Doctor's TARDIS when the older Time Lord had been speaking to the White Guardian (she had no intention of telling the magicians anything about the Guardians or indeed the Key to Time; it would take too long for them to explain the basics behind both, but if she was asked she would have to explain), and she had found the TARDIS to be well maintained, if a bit old fashioned.

"It was an… old ship," she began in a nostalgic tone as she remembered the ship and her general impressions, "half of its technology was outdated, centuries out of date when compared to the current models at the time. It very frequently broke down, sometimes we wouldn't arrive where we wanted to go and always ended up in situations where we either got ourselves locked up or shot at by idiots with blasters. Its camouflage system was shot to pieces so it arrived everywhere in shape of an old fashioned blue box. In every sense," Romana began to finish up, looking at the magicians in the room with her, "my TARDIS is infinitely superior, but there are times I would give almost anything to be in that old Type 40 again."

She smiled as she remembered those simpler days when she didn't have to worry much about anything barring the messes she and the Doctor had gotten into while being on the run from the Black Guardian after that mess with the Key to Time before the events spiralled out of control with the Time War. She wouldn't give up her TARDIS for anything, but she did miss those days where she was able to evolve as a person.

The magicians looked at one another. There was nothing they could say to her little statement, especially given how they had nothing to compare it with.

The Great Wizard cleared his throat - Romana wondered if he was deliberately trying to look and sound impressive with the way he changed the subject, but she had known many politicians who had used the same tactic; it had never impressed her then, and now, so early into her fifth incarnation it didn't impress her now, but she focused on the wizard expectantly.

"What happened, I mean, you explained it briefly in your… machine," he said the word with distaste as if he found the notion of machinery offensive for his precious little ears, "but can you tell us more about 'regeneration'?"

Romana sighed mentally. How many times do I need to tell them? she thought to herself. "Regeneration is how my people can save ourselves from death," she began slowly, as if speaking to a slow child to get the knowledge drummed into his mind, and judging from how the Great Wizard's face reddened he didn't like being treated like a retarded toddler, but truthfully what did he expect? She had told him, told them all, about regeneration.

What was the problem in remembering the details?

Romana had once heard wizards were seen as great wise men with magical powers, who had the right words to make a man a king or to make crops grow but from what she had seen so far she had to admit there was nothing like that here.

"There is a type of energy in our bodies which partially converts our bodies from matter into energy to repair any damage, such as broken spines or legs, damaged organs, and will even remove any disease from the body, making it healthy. But all the organs are replaced and restructured, the height and weight can also change from incarnation to the next. There is also a slight change to personality, but only a slight one; I am still the same person I was many centuries ago, and this is still the same body I started out with the day I was born, but my body has regenerated a few times since. The first time was a voluntary one, but the rest were caused by outside influences," she gave a nonchalant shrug as if it weren't any deal, but it did.

She missed all of her previous lives, especially her first incarnation, though that regeneration was caused because of the naivety which had followed her like a cloak. That version of her had adjusted gradually to travelling beyond Gallifrey with the Doctor, but she remembered how hard it had been to adjust and truthfully she had felt a change was needed.

But her last few lives….

Her third self had been born in a war after she was kicked off the Lord President position in the High Council, and she had immediately thrown in her lot with the renegades because they were the only members of their race who had a gram of common sense. But her next life had been more of a memorial rather than anything else, and her last self had been an incarnation she had enjoyed because she could enjoy life without being judged for her physical age. It was too early for her to tell what this new incarnation was like, but she had not regenerated to remain in Cackles.

"Regeneration is essentially a rebirth. Each incarnation is a link in a chain; you live for a few centuries in one life, and then you regenerate again and again," Romana added while she shelved away her long-term plans for now, though she prayed they didn't ask too many questions on the subject; the less they knew about her abilities, the better.

"How many times have you done this?" Miss Cackle asked curiously.

Romana looked down at her hands with a long sigh. "This is the fourth time I've regenerated, this is my fifth incarnation."

"Your…fifth?" Miss Hardbroom whispered, looking at the two magicians with her with an expression Romana couldn't read, and she cursed her lack of experience with human emotions.

Romana nodded. "Yes," she replied simply.

She was lying. Ever since that mess during the war when the Daleks had tried to steal Ophiuchus' research and knowledge into regeneration, and how the Daleks had ripped out the remaining regenerations in her second incarnation to use for their attempts to wipe out the Time Lords by using the same method on the front lines during the war; it was virtually impossible for Time Lord soldiers to fight against a relentless enemy where you could kill a whole battalion and three battle fleets would come to take their place, but their ability to regenerate allowed them to heal, and to return to the battles. Without regenerations, they would be easy to slaughter.

Romana had been a test subject for the experiment; many of the Time Lords sent out on the mission to find the renowned and radical Time Lord healer, get Ophiuchus back to Gallifrey where their future incarnations would help their people. Romana had already spent twenty years of her second incarnation a prisoner of that filthy disease called the Daleks, but she had always fallen onto her regenerations to keep her alive during that time, only for the injured and tortured Ophiuchus to regenerate with some of the regeneration energy they'd removed from her, before the Time Lord healer restored her ability to regenerate by giving her a whole new regeneration cycle complete with the usual twelve regenerations as an apology for letting those disgusting mutated freaks from going too far. The Daleks had already put the regeneration energy of the Time Lords to use as bioweapons but the base had been destroyed, the other members of the team had died but Romana and Ophiuchus had survived as a result. The Time Lord healer had used what was left to create the building blocks of Romana's new cycle, and they'd returned home with the research.

The second Romana had regenerated as soon as the new cycle had been implanted, making the third Romana the first incarnation of her second cycle.

As the third incarnation of her second regeneration cycle, Romana knew she would have two extra lives.

It wasn't as if she wasn't lying too much; she was technically the fifth Romana, though she would have those two extra lives than the average Time Lord received, and she knew she was not unique given how many other members of her race had received new cycles because either the Daleks had inhibited regeneration from taking place, or the Time Lord had simply run out of lives because of the war.

"Is there anything else you wanted to ask?" Romana asked, hoping to change the topic; the memory of the pain of eleven of her future lives which would never have been lived still haunted her.

Miss Cackle exchanged looks with her deputy and the Great Wizard before she looked straight at the young looking girl questioningly. "Yes," the headmistress began slowly, "who are you, really?"

"Really?" Romana echoed the word with a smile. She had been wondering how long it would be before someone asked her about her true name, though she was a bit surprised by how long it had taken them to get this far, she wasn't complaining since she would have told them much earlier.

"My real name is unpronounceable to humans, and there are telepathic elements to the name you would never be able to communicate it, and even if I gave you a small chunk of my name, you would never be able to understand it. My people also discovered a race of beings who were similar to witches," she smirked inwardly when all three of the magicians reacted in different ways; Miss Hardbroom stiffened, Miss Cackle looked intrigued, and the Great Wizard looked like he was torn between disbelief much like Miss Hardbroom and fascination.

"They had the power of using the name of an individual and using it for their own ends," Romana went on, glossing over the basic history of the Carrionites, "and my people adopted a tradition where we would choose our own names and titles. My chosen name was Romanadvoratrelundar, but most people call me Romana."

"Romana?" Miss Hardbroom repeated sceptically.

The Time Lady nodded. "Yes," she said, holding her head up high and proudly as she remembered how she had adopted her name on her very first day of the Academy, trumping the Time Lords who would usually have assigned some asinine coding to her identity. She had not wanted that, but it was a tradition which was barely used by novice Gallifreyans.

"Why are you here?" the Great Wizard asked, his expression wary as if worried her answer would be a pack of lies. Romana sighed mentally. Truth be told, most alien races out there were not really interested in the human race. The only reason most races went to the trouble of trying to conquer Earth was because the humans had stupidly sent out probes and messages and signals into space, and some of the more hostile races were the equivalent of those people who bought up real estate cheaply and put in luxury hotels and homes in the place of what had come before it. The only problem was the prime real estate was already occupied, that was why many races went through the trouble of overcoming humanity.

 _Why were humans so stupid?_ She had never been able to understand why they were sometimes so thick, but while she wanted to roll her eyes at the wariness in the Great Wizard's voice that she actually gave a damn about the clear fortune she could get with a planet like Earth which was made even more valuable by the industrial areas on the planet, the cities and transportation hubs, primitive though they were, which meant aliens wouldn't have to work too long and too hard to build cities up when they could use what was there was a template, she had to admit he had a good reason to be worried.

She was not human. She could see they were worried about the future of their world - she hoped.

"Ahh," Romana exaggerated the word, much like the Doctor had when she'd travelled with him before that mess in E-Space, but she looked solemnly back at the Wizard as memories of her old friend who had taught her so much and yet exasperated and pissed her off so many times inevitably led to the disaster which was the Time War and on that subject, Romana knew she had to be truthful, and she realised the problem would need an unconventional and radical solution. "Please," she began, holding out her hands as she prepared for the telepathic contact that was going to come, "take my hands, it will be easier-."

Miss Hardbroom stepped back, and Romana wondered if the movement had startled her or if she didn't want to take the hands of a time-travelling alien who was clearly more powerful than she was, but she didn't care. "What are you doing?" the Potions Mistress asked in a voice which couldn't have said she was out of her depth more eloquently.

"Our minds," Romana began, preparing her mind to really connect with the humans, "linked together telepathically; its far easier for you to see my memories and my thoughts and besides the story of what's happened will take far too long to speak about and I want to get it out of the way without you asking any of your stupid and pointless questions. Now take my hands."

The magicians looked at each other, a bit miffed they had to play what they thought was a children's' game, but their curiosity won out; Miss Cackle took Romana's right hand while the Great Wizard took the Time Lady's left, and they both took both of Miss Hardbroom's hands to complete the conduit.

Romana closed her eyes, and concentrated…..

* * *

Miss Hardbroom as a trained witch had long since become used to the bizarre, but when she found herself in a windy cavern, she felt odd. It was almost as though she was there and yet wasn't at the same time. She looked around her surroundings, not recognising them; she had joined a coven whose ancestral holdings were in a cave, but she didn't recognise this place. The strange thing was she could see quite clearly. As she looked around she found the Great Wizard, Miss Cackle and the girl who was claiming to be Mildred Hubble but was in fact named Romana, but she also noticed a ring which seemed to be made from either stone or metal and was a burnished gold in colour. All around, blowing in the wind, were a number of torches that gave the cavern just enough light to see with, but there was something in that ring that provided the rest of the light.

"Oops," Romana chuckled sheepishly (Hecate was reminded of Mildred whenever she had caught the girl doing something reckless, but this was not the time to think about that; she would see this and then she would think about whether or not Romana was telling them the truth), "sorry, I went back a bit too far."

"Where are we?" the Great Wizard demanded.

Romana, meanwhile, was looking ahead and her eyes widened. "I think…. yes, I think this is when it all began. It is."

Tired of the never-ending riddles, Hecate closed her eyes to muster to patience, but Ada got there first; Hecate's long relationship with the headmistress told her quite eloquently the headmistress was just as annoyed, but Ada's patience was being shredded slowly but surely.

Romana's reply was said in a whisper. "This is when I saw eternity," she whispered in awe and Hecate could see something in the young-looking girl's eyes, but she couldn't identify it. "Here I come."

Hecate was just about to ask her what she was talking about when she turned around and spotted four people enter the cavern. Three of them were adults, men, wearing unfamiliar robes which flapped in the winds, but their wearers were unconcerned about it, their faces calm and detached almost as though all of their emotions had been stripped clean. Two of the Their robes were coloured differently from the others - one of them wore robes of deep purple which reminded Hecate of Pippa's school colour, while the third man wore robes of a rich red in colour, highlighted in orange and gold.

The most bizarre things about the appearances of these men were the strange headdresses that rose up in the same manner as the tails of a peacock, and there was a strange skullcap on their heads.

Hecate was so distracted by the adults she almost missed the fourth figure until she watched as all the adults stood around the ring, though one of them escorted a frightened and intimidated looking girl wearing a more simpler set of robes in black and white. Hecate studied her, noting the curly brunette hair, the thin, aristocratic features, and then she remembered what Romana had said, and she turned to the Time Lady next to them.

"Is that-?" she began, though she was unsure how to even ask the question.

"Me," Romana confirmed, looking at her past self with something very much like nostalgia. "That's me. This is the day I began my journey into becoming a Time Lady."

Hecate turned back to watch as the man escorted the girl near the ring, and for the first time, she noticed a large golden platform set into the rocky ground. She watched as the man ushered her firmly onto the platform, though she could see the girl was quite intimidated and nervous.

"Who are they?" Ada asked the question on their minds.

Romana took a deep breath. "They are Attendants to the Untempered Schism," she explained, nodding her head in the direction of the ring, "they are Time Lords. Their job is to ensure novices are initiated into the Academy, this is the first step; looking into the Untempered Schism."

"What is the Untempered Schism?" the Great Wizard demanded to know.

"It's a gap in the fabric of reality; that's the simplest term for it, but it is essentially true. It's basically a window into the Time Vortex, the wormhole my people created millions of years ago in order to create time travel. The schism is designed to show novices who look into it the full scale of time and space, and the universe by making them look into the Vortex that my people ruled over. The ceremony is designed to give children at the age of eight a visible showing of what my people control," Romana said, remembering her initiation well, thanks to showing these humans the ceremony she had never really forgotten but had pushed to the back of her mind. "As you stand there on that platform, you are shown the raw power of time and space, and thanks to the Vortex, you see everything at once; there are barriers around the Schism to prevent it from completely destroying the minds of the children."

Hecate shuddered and was horrified by what she was hearing, and a quick glance at her contemporaries showed her she wasn't alone in her opinion; how could anybody do this to children?

"You stand there, at the age of eight, seeing the scale of the universe thanks to the Vortex where it shows you everything, protected by temporal and telepathic barriers which filter out the worst of the effect," Romana's voice was a whisper as she looked straight into the expression of her much younger incarnation's face; half of Romana's face was visible, but Hecate could see the wonder and the fear present in that so young face….. "Some novices would be inspired. Some would run away. And some….," she sighed as if she didn't want to admit what she was about to say, but she still said it, "some would go mad."

"Which are you?" Miss Cackle whispered, looking between the two versions of the same individual with curious worry.

Romana sighed. "You'll see," she said.

Hecate tried to move, but she couldn't. She was curious about what the Time Lords were showing the younger Romana, but she found she couldn't move.

Romana noticed. "You can't move," she said, "you can only move your torsos, but not your legs. As soon as I realised where we were, I locked us into place; I don't know what would happen if you looked into the Vortex while you were in my memory, but I definitely do not want to find out and trust me; you don't want to look into it."

Hecate was about to unload a truly vicious retort when they suddenly heard the first Romana take a deep breath and turn around and run away from the Untempered Schism. Hecate scowled and sneered at the Time Lords, who were completely unaffected or even concerned about the sight of the clearly frightened girl.

"Why don't they go after her?" she demanded, realising quickly that the same girl was standing next to her.

"They know she won't go far, that's why," Romana replied with a touch of amusement in her voice as she too saw the paradox of Hecate's rather silly and very poorly worded question. "I'll be alright. Besides, they're used to novices running from the Schism. It's an occupational hazard."

Hecate exchanged a look with the Great Wizard and with Ada. Although it was certain that little girl was definitely the same person as the girl who'd brought them here, they didn't have to like the thought of her being frightened out of her wits and the so-called Time Lords doing nothing about it. They didn't even seem to care about the child's wellbeing.

What was worse was the older version of that same girl didn't seem even remotely bothered by it all, though Hecate, Ada, and the Great Wizard were pleased she was going to be alright in the future.

* * *

Author's note - Ophiuchus was a Time Lord healer who was studying the science of regeneration and discovered a means of increasing the number of regenerations to the Time Lords, but the High Council hunted him down, vilifying him and his work. The Fifth Doctor, Turlough, Tegan and Nyssa discovered him dying in the cloisters beneath the Capitol, and the Doctor helped Ophiuchus regenerate into a female incarnation. The new Ophiuchus was allowed to escape, but before she did she prophesised her work would help the Doctor.

Ophiuchus appeared in _The Many Lives of Doctor Who,_ recently printed in graphic novel format.


	6. Chapter 6 End of the War

Disclaimer - I own neither The Worst Witch or Doctor Who, I just own this story.

I am so sorry I haven't updated this story in a while, but I had serious problems with how I was going to write this chapter so I had to give myself time to think. Sorry about the delay.

Please let me know what you think.

Enjoy.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

"So," Ada asked curiously with more than a little apprehension as she studied the Time Lady who had been showing them so many of her memories "what else are you going to show us?"

Truthfully Ada had no idea exactly what to believe. Alright, so she could understand the very real fear Hecate and the Great Wizard showed towards the Time Lady - beings like Vampires and werewolves were not to be underestimated, and they were easily dealt with by powerful witches and wizards, but _an alien from another planet_ was completely out of their league.

But truthfully Ada didn't believe the girl who looked like a girl was a threat. Alright, so some of those memories she had witnessed with Hecate and His Greatness had been both fascinating and yet terrifying, but _they could all tell just by experiencing the memories that they were all truthful._

Ada honestly had no idea how it was possible for the Time Lady to do that, she didn't have the right knowledge of mental manipulation to know, but she guessed her fellow magicians were almost sure Romana was lying about something.

It was slightly shameful in her mind, even if she could very well comprehend their fears and scepticism, that they, witches and one wizard respectfully, should be frightened of Romana simply _because she was different from them._

Having Mildred Hubble (Ada still found it hurtful Romana had pretended to be that girl) in the school where it was believed she was a girl from outside of their world was one thing, but she had been human.

Having an alien around...

Ada was not entirely sure what the Great Wizard's plans were in relation to Romana but she honestly hoped he didn't make a mistake with her.

However, as she asked her question she wondered precisely what Romana had in mind for them all next. The Time Lady had shown them a few memories of her time at her school - the Academy, she referred to it as (Ada wondered if the Time Lady had chosen her school to learn magic for some reason since she had said the word _'Academy'_ with a degree of fondness, but the memories had played before she could even ask the Time Lady what it was), and how she was the complete opposite of what Mildred had been. In fact, if she didn't know any better though she could not tell since she didn't understand the Time Lord educational system to get an idea of what its equivalents were in witch society, she would say Romana was the Time Lord Academy's equivalent of Esmerelda Hallow!

Talk about irony.

Ada didn't understand half of the lessons Romana had been taught by her people on her own world, and for the first time ever she began to see that Mildred Hubble had been struggling with the lessons taught at Cackles. Where girls like Felicity, Enid, Maud, Enid and Esmerelda were more than prepared for the classes since they had come from witch families, but Mildred hadn't been prepared for the challenge.

Ada knew if either herself, Hecate, or the Great Wizard, or indeed any of the other girls at the school, or the members of the Magic Council, or indeed any other witch and wizard on Earth were placed in one of the lessons taught at the Time Lord's Academy, they wouldn't be able to comprehend anything taught.

It was certainly an eye-opener for them though Ada was uncertain if it would make any real difference. Anyway, the memories of the Time Lady's time at the Academy were marred when she had shown them memories of the assassination of their 'Lord President', and a 'renegade Time Lord' called the Doctor was accused of the crime in such a way that the case had seemed to have solved itself.

But then he was proved to be innocent and rumours began to circulate amid the rather insane talk that the strange earthquake was due to subsidence by a plague of mice that the disaster was actually caused by another renegade Time Lord, an evil one known as the Master, who was trying to steal something called the 'Eye of Harmony,' but Romana was very tightlipped about what that was.

A short amount of time passed for Romana, and she was still carrying on with her work at the Academy, and even joined a band with her friends (Ada wasn't sure, but there was definitely an air of sadness whenever one particular friend had appeared at first, another Time Lady Romana named Sartia) before the Doctor once more returned to her planet.

The magicians had witnessed, from Romana's point of view, how the same Doctor who had saved his own world seemed to be involved in an invasion of the planet because of two alien races.

Later they watched as she was sent on a mission to help the Doctor go on an important mission to find something called the Key of Time, but Ada had a hard time working out just how powerful such an artefact was since it wasn't magical in nature. They watched as the Doctor, who seemed to exhibit all the signs of a madman, dragged Romana through one adventure after another.

They also watched as the Time Lady regenerated from the body Romana claimed was her first incarnation and into her second, who resembled the woman called Princess Astra.

Hecate had commented on it, "You can choose how you look?"

"Yes," Romana had replied. "Some Time Lords are better at it than others, in fact when you witnessed me regenerate, I was concentrating on having a young body once more."

Romana glanced at the woman who had been her headmistress for the past few months. "Well, I've shown you a few memories of my time at the Academy," she smiled, thinking how great it had been to show Miss Hardbroom up after having to endure the human fool constantly deride her intelligence, but what made it sweeter was the lessons involved subjects infinitely superior to the witch's precious potions classes, "some of the events I witnessed from the rest of the crowd on my home planet, and some of my memories of my time with the Doctor. But now…," she looked downcast for a moment, "now you're going to see why I am not a threat to you or to your planet."

"But first…," Romana sighed. "I need to give you a bit of backstory. I showed you a few memories of how I became the Lady President of my people," she said, "and it was a great career for me."

Romana sighed again. "Unless of course, you count the time I was a slave of the Daleks. Again."

Ada glanced at Hecate and the Great Wizard. They had witnessed some of Romana's memories during that horrible time, but they also saw that some of the memories were foggy, as if the Time Lady had been trying to protect what remained of her sanity during that period. They couldn't blame her given how the Daleks had treated her before another version of the Doctor rescued her.

"My presidency always had turbulent moments," Romana carried on with her explanation, "but there was never anything I couldn't handle."

The magicians looked at each other - it was hard, especially for HB because she had no idea if this girl had been Mildred Hubble, to believe it.

The girl they had put down was not just an alien from a highly advanced civilisation that was immeasurably older than the human race, never mind the magical community, but had also been _President!_

Romana sighed again suddenly at the memories, and it seemed the mindscape around them seemed to vibrate with the memories. "Well, aside from that disaster with the Dogma Virus, and the conspiracy run by Padrac."

"The what virus, and who in the name of Merlin is Padrac?" the Great Wizard demanded.

"The Dogma Virus. It was created by a bunch of time travelling terrorists made of various members from different races," Romana explained grimly, and her mood seemed to turn everything dark around them. "They were manipulated by the Daleks to be a threat to the Temporal Powers, and they were used in a bid to discredit my time as Lady President of the Time Lords. They created the Dogma Virus which infected my people, but it was a clever piece of weaponry; it would lay dormant, hidden. When the Time Lord regenerated, they became zombies."

Ada and the others looked at one another in horror. Zombification was only possible with the blackest of magic. Turning living, thinking human beings into undead monsters, it was one of the most disgusting forms of magic known to magical kind. The three magicians knew the tricky part was always going to be ensuring the mind was wiped enough to allow the body to be able to stand, and yet not have any memory of the former life.

The easiest way to create a magical zombie was to just use a corpse and reanimate it. Once it was reanimated, all the controlling witch or wizard needed to do was to command them.

But in this context… The three magicians had no idea how regeneration really worked despite what Romana had told them, so there was a lot they didn't understand, and zombies had not existed in the magical world for a long time though every witch and wizard were taught the best way to handle a zombie was to simply cremate it.

It was seen as the only way to truly ensure the body and anything left of the original soul gained some peace.

"I was faced with the difficult choice, of either administering the cure and preventing my people from regenerating ever again, or to rebuild what was left with the archive," Romana went on when she saw where their thoughts had gone; while she found the idea of zombies scary but fascinating, she didn't want to get distracted. "The Dogma Virus was one of those moments on my planet where things were truly complex."

She sighed. "And then Padrac… There were moments during that point in my lives where I wondered if I was doomed to have a Presidency where life was truly complex, and Padrac made things worse. He was one of the Cardinals of the High Council, and he had been given access to the Matrix so he could witness the future and he didn't like what he saw."

"I'd have thought given your attitude your people would not want to be aware of the future," Hecate observed, but although Ada felt her potions mistress needed a lesson in tact and diplomacy, she had to admit she had a point.

Romana chuckled. "True enough," she admitted, "but even a small amount of foreknowledge is essential to ensure the unfolding of the timelines successfully; if my people weren't aware of what was going to happen then how could they catalogue it and file it away?"

Romana's smile faded. "Padrac saw a number of alternate timelines where Gallifrey would be destroyed, either as collateral damage in a war, or engaged in war itself with an enemy he couldn't identify. Padrac was always more concerned with his own safety and for the safety of his own world, so he created a conspiracy movement on Gallifrey where a group of Time Lords would try to destroy reality, or at least to wipe out the future so Gallifrey _wouldn't_ be destroyed."

"Merlin," Hecate whispered.

The Great Wizard stared at the Time Lady pointedly. "I thought your people wanted to protect history," he observed, "and where were you during this…crisis?"

"I was off-world," Romana glared back at him, detecting the insult immediately, "negotiating with other races; I was trying to change Gallifrey for the better, and all that time one of my own Cardinals was conspiring to wipe them out from behind my back, but he was dealt with and the crisis was averted. The timeline Padrac was trying to place upon the universe was negated and everything was restored to normal."

Romana looked away, "And then the Last Great Time War occurred."

Romana closed her eyes and immediately the two witches and one wizard felt their minds invaded with the telepathic download of information about the early beginnings of the Last Great Time War. They watched as Romana, shaken by the loss of the other members of the Temporal Powers - the Monan Host, the Nekkistani, the Sunari, and many of the others, led her to declare war on the Daleks. A terrible war.

They watched as she was deposed from power by the Time Lords, who gave her position of President to a Time Lord known as Rassilon, someone who took a brutal approach to the war and didn't seem to care about destroying or ravaging worlds across time and space.

They watched as Romana regenerated into her next life, though they didn't see that Romana had blocked off the part of her memory where Ophiuchus helped restore her ability to regenerate after the Daleks took it away.

Romana had sent them the memories because it would have taken far too long for her to explain what had happened, and what had caused the war in the first place, and she didn't hesitate to send them the memories of how horrified she was when Rassilon essentially wiped out races who had nothing to do with the war but only did it so then the supremacy of the Time Lords would not be touched.

And on and on it went.

They saw battles where races were practically burnt out of time itself, almost as though they had never existed. They watched as people who had died before were resurrected by the temporal instabilities caused by the fighting as the Daleks spent a lot of their time adapting their race and their technology to allow them to fight on a much greater scale than before. The magicians watched as the war raged through time and space, each side gaining advantages, using terrible weapons which destroyed on a level both beyond their imaginations and their comprehensions. They watched as one side would dominate one period of the war before the other side took the reins and launched violent attacks while both used subterfuge to gain advantages.

But one thing was for sure. The Daleks were continually adapting as they fought to survive in the war. Their numbers were growing more and more numerous; when the Time Lords destroyed two of their armies, ten more seemed to spring up and take their place. The sheer number of these metal war machines terrified the magicians, but what terrified them more was how Romana shoved memories of her own time as a prisoner/slave of the Daleks though they were essentially the same thing.

In the end, was made clear by the Time Lady. Whatever happened, the Time Lords were going to lose.

Romana shook her head as she let the magicians see the memories she had of the Time War. She gave them as much as they could process so they could see just how bad things had grown between the Time Lords and the Daleks, and how the war threatened the universe. But the memory that filled her head now, how Rassilon was been foiled from using the Tear of Ishta on the Tantalus Eye, and how the Doctor's wartime incarnation had rewritten the timelines so the Daleks couldn't fire their De-Mat weapon on Gallifrey, removing the Time Lords from history, and how Rassilon had decided to use the insane Ultimate Sanction plan to end everything, showing a twisted insanity no-one would have expected from a Time Lord of Rassilon's calibre…

"In the end, it came down to a simple choice; let the Daleks overrun the universe and destroy the Time Lords. Let Rassilon destroy us and the whole of the universe we had devoted our lives to protecting and observing to keep everything in one piece. Or find another way."

The memory changed before any of the magicians could do anything more than blink as the memory shifted in the familiar fashion they'd witnessed so many times before.

Romana carried on, hoping this would be like ripping off a band-aid to get everything out to make it all quick and painless. "A long time before the Time War, another renegade Time Lord had found a device which could allow himself to meet his other selves without causing any kind of time paradox. We used the device to go back in time when we'd come up with a plan to save Gallifrey, to tell our younger selves what to do…"

* * *

" _Calling the War Council of Gallifrey, this is Lady Romana calling you," Romana spoke into the scanner of her TARDIS, her voice low and grave as she spoke into the communications system as she addressed the bald image of the Time Lord's commander-in-chief, and probably one of the few people in Gallifrey's army who had any common sense._

" _This is the Doctor," the gravelly tone of the Doctor's war-time incarnation added, announcing his own presence and she saw on her own scanner screen the Doctor appear, his expression so old and weary that it would have been hard to imagine she had once travelled with the man centuries ago, "also calling the War Council. Standing by."_

 _Another image appeared on the screen, showing the face of another old man. "This is Drax, just about ready," the new arrival spoke in the trademark Cockney accent which had been acquired centuries ago when he had been stranded on Earth._

 _The image of a woman with high cheekbones and dark hair appeared on the screen now. "This is the Rani," she said, her expression cold and neutral as she gazed at the image of the war council, but Romana quickly spoke before the Time Lords could say anything else._

" _General, we have a plan," Romana said seriously, her eyes flickering over to the Doctor, who's expression was guarded and worn. She could understand the rationale behind his decision to use the Moment, but she wished they had all reached the solution before he had removed it from the Omega Vault… "It's dangerous, but its the best we've got," she said while the image on the scanner screen shook a little as the transmission was almost severed by the Daleks' firepower._

" _It's insane!" Drax added, making Rani glare at him. "Drax, she wasn't going to say that."_

" _Oh, sorry."_

 _Romana rolled her eyes at the argument, annoyed they were wasting their time with petty squabbles though she said nothing since she knew it was this particular group of renegade Time Lord's way of doing things, and besides this wasn't the time to call anyone out with what was at stake for them all. "We're going to freeze Gallifrey."_

 _The General, who had been following all of this with a mix of worry and foreboding even before she opened her mouth, gaped at her in surprise as if wondering if the Time War, her removal as President, and what she had gone through over the years of the fighting had finally ruined her reputed sharp mind. "What?!" the bald Time Lord got over himself quickly, "My Lady, what are you suggesting?"_

 _Romana lifted the Stasis cube she had mounted on her console to show the Time Lord. "The Daleks are going to smash their way through what's left of Gallifrey's defences in no time. Rassilon is going to unleash the Ultimate Sanction."_

" _What?" The General and more than a few other Time Lords in the room reacted to the news with horror._

" _He-he's going to destroy everything out there?" the General said, gazing at Romana with horrified disgust._

" _Yes, it gets worse," Romana said grimly, "Rassilon's got some insane idea that as the universe collapses the Time Lords will ascend to become beings of pure consciousness alone. He's given up. We're going to prove him wrong in that the Ultimate Sanction is not the only solution."_

" _By freezing Gallifrey in an equally impossible scheme?" the General shook his head. "I'm sorry, My Lady, but your plan is just as mad-."_

" _We're going to lock Gallifrey away in a parallel pocket universe, a sliver of time outside normal space-time," the Doctor interrupted, "using the Stasis cubes we've fitted to all of our TARDISes and calibrated them to work as one."_

" _But…we will be lost in another universe…," the General said, looking at them as if wondering how this plan would work at all. "We will have nothing."_

" _But the Time Lords will have hope!" Drax said, sounding and looking more serious than ever._

" _Something our people have not had in a long time," the Rani pointed out._

" _Yes, I suppose-," the General began again._

 _This was going forever, Romana realised to herself, and groaned inwardly when she saw the indecision on the General's face and she shut off the communication with the War Council in an act of irritation and dismissal, and looked at her fellow renegades, smiling inwardly as she thought of herself as something she had been briefly in her previous life but was now doing it for real; she had hoped to convince the General this plan would work, but they were wasting their time as the Daleks methodically bombarded Gallifrey to pieces._

 _The other renegades were slightly shocked by her action in interrupting the General, but she saw them get over it quickly._

" _Oh, good," the Rani said, "I thought he'd never shut up."_

" _He wasn't going to like what we'd done anyway," Romana shrugged, uncaring that she might have just severed what could have been a good ally in the War Council. "Drax," she turned to the renegade, "is the Blinovitch-Limitation effect limiter ready?"_

 _Drax made a quick check over with his TARDIS console at something none of the others could see through their own scanner screens before he looked up. "Yeah, its working. My other selves will be here soon, just as yours will too."_

 _Romana took a deep breath as she wished she could shove all of her beliefs about how_ dangerous _this whole business was going to become for themselves alone, but with all of their past and future incarnations working together to save their planet._

 _This was tricky in itself - three Time Lord renegades with a Dalek fleet encircling their world, bombing Gallifrey to rubble after millions of years of peace and ordered calm, trying hard not to be hit by any of the Dalek weapons since they knew just one hit would ruin everything but the need to use the Blinovitch-Limitation Effect Limiter Drax had stolen lifetimes ago…Using it was risky at the best of times, but with temporal instabilities surrounding Gallifrey because of the Time War, using the Limiter shouldn't pose any problems, and because it would save them she doubted the Time Lords would penalise them for saving Gallifrey._

 _Well, time would tell…_

 _On the scanner screen, she watched as dozens of TARDISes appeared - more versions of the Doctor's TARDIS, all of them still in that familiar police box shape because of the damaged chameleon circuit, while other TARDISes appeared from different points along their timestreams. Romana was tempted to check her own TARDIS's sensors to tell who those TARDISes belonged too, but she decided against it; this wasn't the time._

" _Calling the War Council of Gallifrey, this is the Doctor."_

 _Romana lifted her head and saw the screen showing the image of the First Doctor who was working on the console in his own TARDIS before he changed the Desktop theme..._

" _This is Drax, also calling the War Council of Gallifrey," a familiar cockney accent belonging to a voice she had not heard in years, and she lifted her head and smiled when she saw the second incarnation of Drax, only at the moment Drax was too busy concentrating on the controls of his TARDIS._

 _An image of the Fourth Doctor with her own first incarnation appeared on the screen, hard at work. Romana watched her younger self, but her younger self did not lift her head, too busy at work._

 _Other faces appeared on the scanner screen, but Romana was too focused on her own work to pay attention; she spotted all of the incarnations of Drax and the Doctor - her experiences with the Doctor who had a style of their own which never changed no matter what incarnation they were in, and thanks to that con Drax had played when she had been in her own second incarnation with the same device which allowed them to interact with one another without causing a nasty paradox, she recognised all of Drax's incarnations. Romana had no problem recognising the few incarnations of the Rani that she was familiar with, and there were quite a few women who exhibited the same haughty cool manner that was a trademark of the Rani._

 _But her own other selves…_

 _Romana knew she should not let herself be distracted while her fingers worked over the console to help the others push Gallifrey into the pocket universe, her mind accessing the nearly complete calculations which had been in the making for centuries ever since the day she had looked into the Untempered Schism..._

 _Thinking of the Schism made her think about this particular plan of theirs; it had been so simple, beam a message into her own mind as a child, and the minds of Drax, the Rani, and the Doctor to work on the calculations to place Gallifrey and everyone on the planet in the parallel pocket universe created by the sliver of time created by the Stasis Cubes, and as she watched creation of the time field which would lock Gallifrey away for Omega knew how long, she looked at all of their incarnations working together to save the Time Lords._

 _She watched her first incarnation working with the Fourth Doctor in their part of their shared time streams (she briefly wondered to herself whereabouts in their travels had they come to Gallifrey during this point in the Time War, and she asked herself if it was at some point during their quest for the Key to Time…), and she saw her own immediate predecessor working with the Sixth Doctor, which wasn't difficult for her to work out where they were since she and that Doctor had worked together after he'd saved her skin from the Daleks after they'd locked her up for twenty years._

 _But her other incarnations…_

 _Romana spotted two smaller girls in two identical TARDIS console rooms in different frames on the scanner screen which looked like the console room of her own TARDIS._

 _It was tempting, she thought to herself idly as she adjusted the controls, just look around and see her other incarnations…_

 _No, she quickly stopped herself._

 _Even if she could be assured that the Blinovitch-Limitation Effect limiter would_ _ **allow**_ _her to meet with them and interact with them much like she and the Doctor had caught the Third, Fifth, Ninth, and Twelfth Draxes met in that pub before the full extent of their con became clear to them, she just… wasn't sure if she even wanted to know anything about her future incarnations. She immediately stopped looking and turned her attention back to her own work, this was very delicate work…._

 _A smile spread across Romana's face as she watched on the console how the temporal field was being created. It was working. Now, if they could make one final rotation and push Gallifrey in…_

 _The TARDIS rocked violently and she was thrown off of her feet, but she jumped back to her feet without giving a thought about the potential injuries she might have received and checked the console over before her eyes widened with horror. The Daleks had realised something was going on and now they were increasing their firepower, which went through what was left of Gallifrey's defences almost as though the sky-trenches weren't still there…_

" _We're almost ready, Romana," the gravelly voice of the Doctor's current incarnation said, his face even more grimmer than usual as he realised what the Daleks were doing._

" _Alright," Romana said, lifting her head and stared at her old friend. "Let's do it."_

 _The console room shook and Romana shook her head. "The Daleks are still attacking; they might not have Battle-TARDISes, but they know what they're doing."_

" _They always do," the Doctor replied grimly, his voice weighed down by the regret he felt for not stopping the Daleks centuries ago. But there was no time to think about that._

 _She shared one last look with the Doctor and she flicked a number of controls, wincing as she felt the telepathic presence of her TARDIS groan under the strain of what they were doing, and she patted the console gently before she inputted the last of the equations that had been worked out in her mind for this current regeneration._

 _Now, if only the others could input their own equations and push Gallifrey into the time bubble-_

 _Suddenly there was a flash of light that washed over her as though one of the Daleks weapons had exploded in front of her TARDIS, and it pushed against her ship with incredible force that threw her to the ground where she smacked her head against the wall - Romana would never be entirely sure about what had happened and why, but later on when she tried to piece together the last few seconds between inputting the equations into the console to push her world into the time bubble to protect them, she would guess one of the Daleks weapons had exploded close to her TARDIS, forcing her ship to jump time tracks and sending her away just after she had finished her own contribution to saving Gallifrey._

 _When she recovered slowly, she looked around the TARDIS console room in confusion before she realised something important. She couldn't hear any other Time Lord._

 _Romana was so shocked by the revelation that she couldn't do anything more than lean her head back against the wall, and cry._

 _What was she going to do now?_

* * *

"So. There you have it," Romana said grimly to the magicians who were watching her as they finished seeing the memory of what had befallen Gallifrey, "My friends and I had saved our world with the help of all of our past and future lives, the Dalek fleet surrounding Gallifrey were destroyed when my planet was pushed into a pocket universe. But somehow I was pushed out of the fighting."

"And you still have no idea what caused it?" the Great Wizard asked in a whisper as he tried to take in everything that he had seen.

"I do, but I'm not sure if it was fate or destiny," Romana whispered. "My best guess was the explosion and what we were doing caused my TARDIS to jump forwards through time, though its possible my ship had something to do with it, and so I managed to escape the Time War while my friends and the rest of my people weren't so lucky, and I've been looking for Gallifrey ever since."

"But you haven't found it, obviously," Hecate said, making Ada glare at her angrily for her lack of tact. Romana speared her with a look which promised some awful menace if she didn't shut up.

"No," she replied, shaking her head. "But one of the biggest problems I've got is that I'm not entirely sure if it did work."

"You're not?" Ada was surprised; she didn't understand just how what Romana, the Doctor, this Rani, and that other Time Lord had done even though she knew they had sent information back into the past, but she would have assumed Romana was _**sure**_ her world had been saved. "But I thought-?"

"You thought after everything I'd done with my friends would have worked, but thanks to being thrown clear and sent forwards into time, I don't know what the outcome was," Romana interrupted, a solemn look upon her face that hid an emotion which was barely straining to get out. "I can't take my TARDIS back through time either since the Laws of Time prevent it."

"You met your other selves-."

"That's different," Romana sent back. "The Blinovitch Limitation Effect Limiter worked perfectly in the final battle of the Time War because of the temporal instabilities; what myself, Drax, the Rani, and the Doctor were doing with our past and future lives barely made any difference, but if I go back, I don't know what could happen."

She wasn't entirely being truthful and she only just managed to hide the deception from the magicians. It had crossed her mind to travel back into the final battle, knowing that thanks to her experience she should be able to get back without the Daleks detecting her presence and opening fire once more.

And she had.

She had tried to go back into the war shortly after being thrown clear of it to find out what had happened to her world and her people and her friends, but the TARDIS simply would not take her. And she had thought the Doctor's old Type 40 was stubborn, but she had later found out it had little or nothing on her Type 70.

When it had been time for her previous self to head back into the fray, she had tried to figure out what had happened, but the battle had taken all of her attention away and forced her to focus on her work. Still, she had seen and experienced enough to get a clear picture into her mind that the explosion had indeed caused her TARDIS to react, but she still wasn't sure why and whether or not Gallifrey had survived.

In her previous incarnation, Romana had hoped to find some evidence of Gallifrey's survival, but there was nothing.

She was not sure if her people had somehow found a way to escape the pocket universe, but then again she had no way of knowing if her world had survived that way.

That was one of the reasons why she believed herself to be the last Time Lord. It was a dark thought, but she lived in hope. It was all she had left, and that was a truly depressing thought.

Romana sighed, hoping that the dark direction of her thoughts had gone unnoticed by the humans. "Alright, if there's nothing else. I would like my mind back and some privacy, thank you-."

"Actually, we're still not sure if you are, or were, Mildred Hubble," Miss Hardbroom interrupted, looking at Romana with that familiar cold stare.

Romana closed her eyes. She was tired of this, and while she had recovered from her regeneration, the last thing she wanted to do was to keep on entertaining these humans in her mind. Still, if she showed them what had happened to the real Mildred and Julie, they might back off…

* * *

Author's Note - The Blinovitch Limitation Effect Limiter was first featured in the brilliant Big Finish Audio The Trouble with Drax where nearly all of Drax's different lives came together to con the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana into stealing it for them.


	7. Chapter 7 The Fate of the Real Hubbles

I own neither Doctor Who nor The Worst Witch, who both belong to their respective owners.

Feel free to leave feedback.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

Romana was tired and she was getting extremely tired by all of this; showing the memories of her life and the events of the Last Great Time War which had left her alone had been trying on the nerves, but now she was about to show these people how she had come to Earth in the first place. She wasn't looking forward to it, either; the memories of what had happened to the real Hubbles had haunted her for years, and she was certain they would continue to haunt her throughout the rest of her lifetimes.

But as she had shown them her memories, Romana had begun to realise something that had been on her mind for a while ever since she had regenerated.

She wanted to leave Cackles.

She had no more reason to hang around the school anymore, and with the TARDIS within easy reach, it would be easy to just walk away now, and return to her travels in time and space while she tried looking for Gallifrey. With a bit of luck, she might be able to discover some clue as to what had happened to her planet.

She sighed when she saw their waiting expressions, and she closed her eyes and selected the right memory….

* * *

 _Romana staggered into the TARDIS console room, one arm wrapped around her chest as she tried to stop herself from shaking, already feeling the tell-tale burning inside of her chest as her hearts struggled to work; one of them had been damaged by the radiation from the Dalek bolt, and now the other was working on keeping her alive._

 _Romana knew she was regenerating. It had already started, and as she walked painfully over to the TARDIS console, she remembered what had happened to her. It was almost out of a dream, really. She had just been shot by a Dalek after she had triggered the Delta wave on the Gamestation in the last act to finally bring down the Time Lords and make her people extinct, but Romana had managed to dodge the worst of the blast. However, the blast had still hit her body and passed it only to hit against a bulkhead head-on. Fortunately, Romana had been close to her TARDIS when she had been caught by the Dalek's death ray, and she had re-entered the ship._

 _As she staggered to the console itself, she almost collapsed onto it. The agony of her injury was making it hard for her to concentrate, and she wished Jack were still alive, but he wasn't. She knew the ex-Time Agent, he would have attacked the Daleks head-on, and he would have helped her inside the TARDIS and gotten them both away from here by now._

 _But Jack was dead, and she closed her eyes in remembrance while she started the TARDIS up; she could have used the voice-control systems of the TARDIS Navigator system, but she was in so much pain she doubted she would have been able to get the words out. It seemed to take her ages before the Time Lady was able to set the controls to Earth, though she didn't bother setting a proper course; she just wanted to get away from this particular era before she went mad completely._

 _She moved her hand, crying out in pain as she looked at her limb which had only now just begun to go numb, and she looked at her hands. Already they were beginning to slowly glow as the regeneration started to become visible. The sight of the glow and the brightness of the light which signified she would regenerate shortly seemed to mock the Time Lord._

 _So many people had died on the Gamestation, the place she had known as Satellite 5, after that mess with the Jagrafess before Adam had screwed everything up. Romana closed her eyes as a host of memories surged out of nowhere to haunt her; Adam Mitchell's betrayal, Rose Tyler, Cathika, those dead frozen people who were nothing more than puppets to the Editor._

 _Romana gazed at the glow of her hands, knowing that if she wanted to live then she would need to regenerate now. She was prepared for it, and yet…_

" _No," she groaned and grimaced as she redirected the injury into repairing the damage to her body while the TARDIS materialised somewhere. "NO!"_

 _She staggered around as she forced the regeneration away with a burst of sheer willpower. "I can't do it, not just yet," she whispered to herself, cradling her chest again as a surge of pain went through her, and she closed her eyes to fight off the temptation to regenerate. "I…I just can't, not just yet. I am tired," she looked up to gaze around the console room. "I am so tired. I am tired of regenerating, living, seeing nothing but destruction…. and then waltzing off with a new body. I've had enough! And yet…. I know I need to look for my people. Let me have a bit more time!" she beseeched the TARDIS before she opened the doors and walked out of the ship._

 _Romana found herself in a street. The Time Lady left the TARDIS where she had landed the time machine and wandered around the streets, confused about the sounds while she cradled her chest; the partial regeneration she had just gone through had done some good in repairing the damage, but her body was still regenerating and there was nothing she could do about it now._

 _The Time Lady knew she would have to return to the TARDIS and begin her regeneration soon, but first, she was curious about where she was. She had no idea where and when she was, and the pain was making it hard for her to concentrate properly. But when she pushed the pain away with another burst of regeneration energy which she had aborted again, she regained some of her focus. As she took a deep sniff of the local timezone she wanted to drop with exhaustion when she found she was in the middle of the London Blitz. She closed her eyes, furious with herself for coming here in the first place; she should have remained in her ship and regenerated instead of leaving before she even knew where and when the TARDIS had landed. Immediately, as soon as the thought registered, she could hear the distant sounds of the bombing._

" _Just my luck," she whispered to herself as she made her decision to head back to the TARDIS and escape to somewhere a bit more peaceful, not to mention as far from the Second World War as she could get, "I get shot by Daleks. I'm regenerating, and now I find myself in one of the worst points of human history."_

 _Romana pushed aside her negative thoughts and tried to focus on her TARDIS homing instinct; it was one of the benefits of being a Time Lord and linked to a TARDIS, you had an instinctive knowledge of where your ship was. As she pushed through the pain in order to concentrate, cursing herself with each step created more pain in her chest. Why had she left the TARDIS? Why had she not bothered to take proper instrument readings? Had the TARDIS done it deliberately, landing in the middle of an air-raid where there was every chance of being blown to bits? A Time Lord might be able to regenerate, but it wouldn't work if there were bits of skin, organ, and bone spread over a large area._

 _Romana gasped as another sharp pain lanced its way through her chest, followed by the burning of regeneration energy. She had to find the TARDIS now and getaway. She had no idea how long she could hold on for. The longer she held down the regeneration, the more dangerous it would become. She looked around the street, sensing that her TARDIS was a lot further away from her than she would like. Romana trudged on, only to bump into two people, two humans of this period. One of them was a child with dark looking hair and a dirty moon-shaped face with cherubic features and dark eyes, the woman who was most likely the girls' mother was taller with long curly darkish hair, but in this light it was virtually impossible for Romana to see it clearly, but Romana had problems guessing her actual age - humans and Time Lords may look similar, but an old looking Time Lord would probably be young, or in middle age, so placing age was never particularly simple._

" _Are you okay, love?" the woman asked, instantly worried when she noticed how Romana was clutching her chest._

 _Romana scuttled back instinctively although she knew they weren't a threat. "Not really," she replied, hoping her voice didn't sound as breathless as she hoped even with her respiratory bypass system._

 _The woman was giving her an appraising look while the Time Lady looked back at her when she saw there was something different about this woman and the other people whom she had met in this city in the past. "We should get you to a doctor," she decided, taking Romana by the arms and leading her away from the path she was taking._

 _Romana inwardly screamed at the thought of not being able to get away from this hostile era in human history, but she knew it was not a good idea. But the girl looked up at her curiously. "Why were you going that way? The underground is that way?" she pointed in the opposite direction._

 _Before the Time Lady even had a chance to respond, the mother turned her head towards her daughter. "Millie," she reproved warningly before she turned to Romana curiously, "Sorry 'bout her," she replied, apologising for her daughter although truthfully Romana was not bothered; she had encountered more than her fair share of curious younglings on Gallifrey during the Dalek bombardments._

" _Were you looking for someone?" the woman asked, not thinking she was taking a leaf, as the humans said, out of her daughter's book as they headed in the general direction of the London Underground._

 _Romana hadn't been on the system for a long time. In many ways, it reminded her of a more primitive version of the trans-tube railway network on Gallifrey. She knew that the people of London had used it as a ready-made and convenient bomb shelter, much like the one of Gallifrey. But Romana was not looking forward to being trapped underground for Omega knew how long, regenerating, and waiting for someone to see the energy as it leaked from her body. While her mind was racing and trying to think of a plausible way of getting away from these two, Romana decided to answer their questions._

 _At least for now._

" _Yes," she replied, gasping from the pain her wound caused. "I was looking….looking for my husband," she went on expanding the lie, and hoping the woman and her daughter didn't pick up on it. "He went out earlier, but I haven't seen him since. I left my home without my gas-mask when the air-raid started. But I haven't seen him since. Did you two come across anybody?" she asked, looking between the mother and daughter, bringing them both into the lie._

" _No," the woman replied while her daughter shook her head. "We've only just arrived in London; we came down from the North when we realised the bombs could drop on our heads. But we were growing tired of what was happening up there, and we decided to make a fresh start down south."_

 _As she looked between the pair, Romana remembered a scrap of World War Two history, about children being forcibly evacuated down to the coast from somewhere in the back of her mind. "How long have you been in London?"_

" _Only a couple of days," the girl replied before she held out her hand, remembering they hadn't yet been properly introduced. "Sorry, my names' Mildred, Mildred Hubble."_

 _Romana smiled down at the girl, although it was tinged with pain. "Nice to meet you, Mildred," she replied warmly, taking the offered hand and shaking it gently and hoped Mildred wouldn't get tempted to shake it really hard. "My name is Romana."_

 _The mother was smiling at the kind and polite way her daughter was greeting this stranger. "And I'm Julie," she introduced herself with a smile, but her expression became worried when she saw Romana grimace in pain again. "Come on, love, we'll help you?"_

 _ **How do you convince a pair of humans, nice as they are, there is nothing that they can actually do to help?**_ _Romana thought to herself, wondering desperately how she was going to get away from them. They would likely try to catch up and demand to know what was going on, but Romana had no intention of letting these two know about her alien nature._

 _For the next half an hour while the Hubbles' tried to take her to an Underground station, it took a moment for Romana to guess these two were completely lost. It didn't help matters the city of London was a maze, and thanks to the air-raid the streets were practically dark so the light wouldn't attract the bombers._

 _With each step, Romana could feel herself becoming physically weaker and weaker as she tried hard to keep her strength going. But it was no good, she was regenerating, and there was nothing she could do about it._

 _A bomb exploded, and Romana looked around. "That one was quite close," she commented before she caught sight of Julie's expression. The physically older looking woman looked terrified, and she sent a look at her daughter that Romana recognised instantly; she had caught that same expression on the parents of the numerous children on Gallifrey when they had tried to hide from the Daleks._

 _Romana took a deep breath, and she was about to say something to persuade these two to leave, but before she had a chance she felt a moment of disorientation, and she staggered on her feet._

" _Romana?" Julie was instantly by her side. "What's the matter?"_

" _Just feeling a bit faint," Romana gasped and she held onto her chest. "You two better go. Get to the shelter, don't worry about me…"_

" _Don't be stupid!" Julie said forcibly as she gently but firmly took hold of the Time Lady's arm. Her daughter did the same thing, and together they dragged the woman to the shelter. Romana closed her eyes for a second so she could master the pain she was feeling and push it aside; she could feel the regeneration energy inside of her body, it was struggling to get out, and she doubted it would take long before the first tell-tale glows of the process became visible for Mildred and Julie to notice…._

 _Just as they were walking through the streets, a loud whistling as one of the German bombs came down. Romana looked up at the sound of the bomb, but before she could do anything there was a terrible explosion, and Romana felt a flash of pain in her forehead while she felt a searing burning pain in her chest, but as she fell unconscious she heard the sound of screaming…._

 _Romana groaned as she came too, and as she looked around and saw the smouldering flames in the street amongst the piles of rubble of what had been buildings in the street._

 _She took a few moments to do a quick check on herself, and she realised that despite the pain she was in, she had no regenerated. She still felt the same as she had before, her clothes still fit her, so it hadn't happened when she had been unconscious. Her vision became blurry, and she needed to close her eyes and blink, but her head was swimming while she looked around while she tried to remember what had happened._ _ **I was with Julie and Mildred. A bomb had exploded and showed us with rubble, and then…. oh, no!**_ _Romana's eyes shot open and her nausea was shoved to the side while she painfully pushed herself up, and she looked around where she had fallen to the ground when the bomb had fallen, her mind bringing back that terrible scream with equally terrible clarity._

" _Julie?" she called out, horrified when she heard her own voice; it was so croaky, and her chest and throat ached as she forced the words out of her mouth, but she needed to find them and quickly. "Julie? Mildred, anyone?"_

" _Julie, Mildred, where are you?" she called louder while forcing her body to squeeze out more energy to yell, and then suddenly she looked around herself to where she was, and she took in the piles of rubble near her. There was something…. wrong about them. With a sinking feeling in both of her hearts, including the one that had been shot by the Dalek, Romana crept around and her heart ached when she saw the two Hubbles' lying dead on the ground._

" _No," she whispered and she instantly felt their pulses, hoping to feel the singular heart rate of the average human. "No," she repeated when she saw the two of them were both lying dead, their clothes dusty from the rubble. Romana looked down and cried, she was cursing the universe at large for being so quick to destroy._

 _Her people had been forced to fight a never-ending war where both sides came up with new ways to rip time to tatters, and while there were moments she had blamed the Doctor for it, for not destroying the Daleks before they had a chance to become a major intergalactic and intertemporal threat to space and time, the Time Lady knew other factors were responsible, but why did the universe still have to be so cruel?_

 _What had Julie and Mildred Hubble ever done to deserve this? They had already left their home up north, came down south while trying to get to the coast so they could have a new life, and now they had been bombed in a senseless war, ordered and arranged by a man with delusions of grandeur while following and orchestrating a philosophy steeped in Religious bigotry._

 _Romana sobbed and she sank her face straight into the tight space between the two corpses, feeling their warmth. It chilled the Time Lady, these two had been very much alive, and now they were gone. While she sobbed, Romana was practically dead to the world. She could hear the sound of the German bombs, but they may as well have been the sounds of people walking around her for all she cared. She refused to move from the dead bodies, and she could not work out why she was feeling this much sorrow; she had barely known the two for more than two hours, and yet she had been amazed by their kindness and willingness to help her…_

 _Suddenly she felt her fingers and her hands slowly beginning to get hot, and she lifted her head up to get a good look at them. They were beginning to glow, the regeneration was happening._

 _Romana looked at the two bodies, tempted to do it. She could do it. She could use the regeneration energy to bring the Hubbles' back to life. It was more than possible; with the temporal energy of the regeneration, she could reverse the damage their bodies had sustained before their deaths even though Romana had no idea how they had actually died since this wasn't the greatest place to perform an autopsy._

 _But she couldn't._

 _As she was lifting her hands to force the regeneration energy into their bodies, she hesitated. While she wanted to help them, Romana was still a Time Lady, and she was reminded of that when she realised Mildred and Julie were both meant to die._

 _Romana couldn't help herself and she was even surprised when she lifted her head and screamed. It just wasn't fair! It wasn't fair that these two kind people had been killed in this waste of war, and that there was nothing she could do about it. Romana looked down and sobbed, feeling the hopelessness of the whole mess._

 _She glared at her glowing hands with malevolent anger, hating this. Why was she allowed to live when there were people who had the right to live? Romana looked down at the bodies, and at her glowing hands and she realised that there was a way, a rather morbid way she could remember and honour the Hubbles._

 _It was a grimmer and darker way of remembrance than what she had done back when she had regenerated for the first time using Princess Astra's appearance as a template, but she felt this time it was more appropriate. The only problem was which body did she choose? Romana looked between Mildred and Julie's bodies and did her best to choose as quickly as she could. She knew that when she regenerated her new appearance would shape the way others looked at her, so she had to get this right._

 _Romana looked at Julie, logically seeing her appearance as a default. The other woman had been an adult, but truthfully as she thought it through the Time Lady found herself rather bored with adult life for reasons that escaped her. In any case, she could take a look at the bodies now, and whichever one she chose to use now for the next few centuries could be replaced with another._

 _Romana glanced at Mildred's body. Yes, the girl had been fairly short, but that was manageable really. As she gazed at the smaller of the two bodies, Romana wondered again if she had the moral right to do this. But in the end, she decided to go with Mildred's appearance. She was just too tired and so fed up with having to deal with adult responsibilities, and now she had a way out. Oh, she would continue to look for Gallifrey, but she didn't need to be in an adult body to do that even if it would feel strange._

 _The choice made, Romana closed her eyes and focused her energy on Mildred's form. She stood up slowly and kept her eyes closed, feeling the regeneration energy surge through her body. She would miss this life, really; while it had been bored and used in a Time War, she had liked the change of personality she'd had from her previous two lives, but hopefully, with this new life she wouldn't be scared about what came next._

 _She threw her arms out and let the regeneration take place, uncaring about any potential damage being done to the street with the transformation; with all the bomb damage the city had sustained since the war had begun, the Londoners wouldn't have any trouble guessing the regeneration damage was done by her, instead of a bomb. She felt her body becoming smaller and smaller. Finally, it was over, the physical change had happened, and it was gone. She tottered around with her centre of balance and gravity completely shifted now she was far smaller in height than she had been before, and it did not help one iota that her clothes were now baggy and ill-fitting._

 _"I made it, then" she said, her voice shaky while she tried clearing her throat and getting Mildred's voice right._

 _Romana gazed down at the two bodies regretfully before she walked on, back towards the TARDIS. There was nothing she could do for the two bodies, though she was tempted to burn or bury them somewhere where their remains would be undisturbed, the Time Lady decided against it and she returned to her TARDIS._

* * *

"So there you have it," Romana's voice was grim as she recounted the deaths of the two Hubbles, "that's the story of how I came to be in my last incarnation. The Hubbles had tried to leave their old lives behind and make new ones in another part of the country during a time of hellish war, only they met their ends. I couldn't do anything about them, I didn't know if they had relatives so I couldn't contact anyone, and even when I did regenerate I was in total flight instinct, meaning I had to leave in my TARDIS."

"So… with the Hubbles' gone, you were free to take Mildred's identity, but what about Julie?" Miss Cackle asked.

"She's a temporal image of one of my future regenerations," Romana explained. "Time Lords have the power to reach into their futures, and take a sliver of it and project it. The woman who calls herself "my mother" is nothing of the sort; she's just a temporal shade, but I knew that when I found her, she would not be my next incarnation but one of my future ones instead. It doesn't matter though, regeneration is a regeneration."

"Why would you do this, deceive us in this way?" Hardbroom asked.

"Hecate!" Miss Cackles' voice was dangerous.

"I deceived you because I wanted to learn more about the magical world. I was amazed when I discovered that a world of magic actually existed, so I decided to study it. Being in the body of a child was a bonus," Romana said, gazing solemnly up at the teacher. "I regenerated into this form because I had grown to like being in the body of a child."

"So, you were studying us?" the Great Wizard asked.

Romana looked into his face and hoped this meant the human was more open-minded than before. "Yes, essentially. I also needed something different to take my mind off of the war, off of the fact I was alone. But it doesn't matter anymore."

"What do you mean?"

Romana closed her eyes and then suddenly the magicians found themselves back inside the sickbay. She waited for the magicians to recover from being disconnected from her mind to fully re-aware of the real world before she spoke. "I'm leaving."

* * *

Until the next time.


	8. Chapter 8 The End is just the Beginning

I don't own either the Worst Witch or Doctor Who.

Feel free to tell me what you think as this is my final chapter.

* * *

Tempus Autem Domine.

For a moment none of the magicians knew what to say, the announcement had taken them by surprise so they were knocked off balance.

Finally, the Great Wizard broke the silence as he looked at the physically smaller and younger Time Lady. "Leaving? What do you mean, you're leaving?" he demanded.

Romana shrugged. "Exactly as it sounded, Your Greatness," she replied. "I don't see any reason why I should hang around anymore."

"Where would you go?" Miss Cackle asked.

"Everywhere and everywhen, Miss Cackle," Romana replied. "Don't forget I can travel in time and space."

"So you will just leave in your machine?" the Great Wizard nodded as if he had just expected it. "But what brought this on; you said you had come to Cackles Academy in order to study our world; surely you haven't finished?"

"I haven't," Romana admitted, "but it was just a passing fad for me. That's the problem with regenerating into a new body; it's like going to bed one night with something on your mind, only to discover you've changed it the next day. Regeneration is exactly the same."

"So you will just leave your Magical eduction behind?" Miss Hardbroom said, looking down at Romana with a certain disdain that didn't sit well with the Time Lady.

While the Time Lady was inwardly annoyed by the disdain and was actually resending the disdain back in equal measure to the human, Romana just shrugged, unconcerned by what HB was implying, the fact she was not willing to make the effort. If she believed that then she hadn't learnt a great deal about her from the memories they'd just seen, but it didn't matter all that much to her. The magical education had never suited her. "Yes, I don't feel comfortable anymore, not after my regeneration," she replied.

She was stretching the truth a bit there and she knew it. She had considered the benefits of returning to this school after she had left the planet for a bit to look for Gallifrey. Finding her home world was much harder than people might think, and she had needed a place to crash from time to time. Cackles had just been a nice little distraction for her, though truthfully she had spent a great deal of the last two centuries on this planet while she had looked up places -both in space and in time - to find her people.

But she had from time to time wanted to just leave the school. She didn't particularly like the manner of many of the students towards her, how she was so ignorant of magical lore and customs, but she especially despised the bias of the teachers. She had always been frustrated because none of them had made the effort to try to support her, tell her where she was going wrong in the lessons. Instead, they had turned a blind eye to the bullying. It was quite petty, really; Romana had encountered enough flak from the Prydonian Academy back home when she was a child simply because she had gotten excellent grades, but truthfully while in the past the thought of learning how to become a witch had been compelling and had fascinated her, she had quickly become bored, and had more than once wondered why she bothered.

With her new incarnation, however, Romana had changed her mind and she didn't want to be here anymore. While it was a shame she wouldn't be with Maud and Enid anymore, the Time Lady was okay with that so long as they could remain friends. That is, if she could get them to see she was the same person they had known.

"You are running away because of that?" Hardbroom pressed on, the look of disdain clear on her face.

"Yes, Miss Hardbroom," Romana said, hoping this made the teacher understand, "with the regeneration, I've changed my mind about staying here. The fact I am leaving behind the magical education is inconvenient to my original plans to study the magical culture, but it doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter?" Hardbroom leaned in and snapped in Romana's face, eyes both sparkling with anger, "We have spent _months_ lavishing our education onto you, only for you never to grasp the basic tenets of magic. And now you are going to run away?"

"Hecate," Miss Cackle began warningly, but the physically younger witch ignored her.

"I believe this is proof the only people who can learn to become true witches are witches," Miss Hardbroom went on, spitting with anger, "even _non-witches,_ something we believed _you_ to be, would be more worthy, but not an _unnatural alien!"_

"I'm unnatural am I, then what are you? You are nothing more than another pathetic little human who thinks they are kind or queen of their own little world. You are so finite, Miss Hardbroom, it's pathetic!" Romana screamed in Hardbroom's face, the force of the yell alone making the human, who was already really close to the Time Lady, fall back in surprise. Clearly, the woman was not used to students shouting in her face.

"You saw my memories, Miss Hardbroom," Romana went on, glaring at the teacher with distaste. "You saw my memories of the Time War; do you really think the Daleks wouldn't have come to this planet, enslaved your species - not just magical kind itself, but non-magical as well? Let me tell you something; the Daleks don't observe the boundaries. They don't care about the rules of war. They don't give a damn about your society, you might be able to fight them with your magic, but eventually, you would lose, and millions would suffer. The Daleks are like cockroaches, they adapt on a terrifying level. They don't care about your precious, primitive traditions. They don't care about your code, either. They would have enslaved you if my people hadn't fought them. Granted, many of my people saw the war as a minor inconvenience and nothing to concern themselves about until Time Lord civilisation was practically lying in _pieces_ at their _feet."_

Romana's glare turned to Miss Cackle. "I'm going whether you like it or not, but I refuse to spend another minute of my new life in the company of a _filthy_ bigot with delusions above her station. Goodbye, Miss Cackle. Most of it was fun."

Romana slipped out of the room, only to run into Maud and Enid, who had both been listening outside the room and were now looking at her with surprise.

* * *

Maud and Enid had been wondering what to do since the 'regeneration' as the girl, Romana, called it. They were starting to accept the fact the girl whom they had known as Mildred Hubble was in fact the girl who had appeared in a flash of light, but they were both taken by surprise by the manner in which Romana had spoken to the older magicians.

Had Mildred always been bottling her innermost thoughts of the teachers? More than once they had noticed Mildred had been impatient with a few of them, and even nonchalant about their attitude towards her, but she had always tried to keep the peace between them. Now those days were over, and as much as Maud and Enid did not want Romana to leave, they could understand that their friend had had enough of Cackles, and just wanted to leave the school. Maud and Enid didn't want Romana to leave, but they soon came to accept it, and after hearing what Miss Hardbroom had just said to Romana, giving in to bigotry, much like she had said to Romana back when she had been Mildred.

They were both taken by surprise by what the Time Lady said in return, yelled in fact. Both of them were left wondering just how long Romana had been waiting to say something like that to HB's face. They were starting to see, as much as it hurt them to admit it, there was a lot more to the person they had thought they had known.

Enid and Maud had watched through the lock of the door for some time, they had listened as Romana explained a bit more about the Time Lords, regeneration, her TARDIS, and several other things. They had seen as Romana had shared her memories with Miss Hardbroom, Miss Cackle, and the Great Wizard, and the two girls wondered just what they were seeing sun Romana's mind with but all they had seen for the last hour they had witnessed Romana holding hands with the older people as though they were about to play a game of "Ring a Ring of Roses" though they just stood as still as statues.

Finally, they had seen Romana release them, and then it had degenerated when she had made the surprise announcement that she was leaving Cackles, that she had had enough. Only Miss Hardbroom had not liked the announcement, which the two young witches could more or less understand, though they thought she had gone around everything so badly, and it was clear that if Miss Hardbroom, much like all the other students in the school who had denigrated Mildred for months simply because of her non-magical nature, but now they knew the truth of 'Mildred's' alien nature, HB was even more threatened.

When the two girls saw Romana leave the sickbay, the two parties were taken by surprise.

"You saw all of that, right?" Romana asked, not very surprised.

"Yeah, we did," Maud replied, sending Enid an unsure and questioning glance before turning back to look at the girl who was apparently the fifth person who included Mildred Hubbles' appearance and persona. Suddenly Maud was caught between feeling upset and angry that this girl was leaving them because she was no longer interested in them, and upset because she was leaving without really trying to make the effort to fit in.

Romana sighed. "I'm sorry, guys," she said, walking away from the sickbay because she had no idea and frankly did not rally care given what Miss Hardbroom had just said to her face about what the teachers reactions to Maud and Enid being close by, eavesdropping and looking through the lock at what was going on inside, though the last thing she wanted was to cause either of the two girls any grief.

"Why do you have to go?" Enid asked.

Romana sighed again as she tried to think of a good reply. "I'm sorry, Enid," she replied, "but since my regeneration, I just don't feel comfortable here anymore."

"Is it because of HB?"

"Well, she hasn't helped," the Time Lady replied darkly, remembering all of those moments where the teacher had made all of those unsubtle remarks, how 'Mildred' had been a disgrace simply because she couldn't ride on a broomstick properly, cast a spell correctly, or brew a potion without it exploding in her face. "But the point is I've been thinking about leaving for some time."

The confession shocked both of the girls.

"What do you mean?" Maud asked.

Romana bit her lip as they walked down the corridors, the Time Lady doing her best to avoid the stares she was getting from the students they were meeting. She was often used to the stares she had gotten in the past, so she was putting them out of it this time. She found that she didn't care, really didn't care what the students were thinking. Why should she? She wasn't going to be here now anyway, so they would have to have someone else to stare at.

"It's not just the way I've been treated. I came to the magical world to study it, to learn more about it, but now I've had enough. Even back in my…last self," she stumbled slightly over the words because she had no idea honestly how Maud and Enid would react, "I wondered if it was really worth it. But now… Now I've regenerated into a new body, I find I don't really care about magic anymore. Yeah, its still fascinating to me, but its not something truly important for me to learn about anymore."

"Does it happen often, when you….regenerate… you lose interest in things?" Maud whispered aghast, horrified that the girl she had befriended might now no longer really care much about them anymore.

"It varies," Romana replied with a shrug, although she could tell what was in Maud and Enid's minds without having to read them; she could tell what they were thinking just by looking at their expressions. The idea they thought she was bored of them was not a hard one for the two humans to get, but the hard part would be persuading them she was leaving to get away from Cackles, not from them.

They could still be friendly with each other without Cackles in their lives.

For a moment Romana entertained the possibility of taking these two away during the night, and as she thought about it the more attractive the prospect was, but as the thought occurred to the Time Lady, another possibility entered her mind.

Ethel Hallow.

Truth be told, Romana had never really been bothered by the more vindictive human. The Time Lady had been a star of psychology at Cackles, she knew that Ethel was suffering from all kinds of grief thanks to the grief her parents heaped on her shoulders. The Witches' code didn't help matters, really; Romana was sometimes taken by surprise by how similar most civilisations were to Time Lord culture when you really got down to basics, though on Gallifrey there wasn't a central set of regulations and rules you had to follow every day, though the attitude many young Gallifreyan novices before they had received the rank of Junior Time Lord possessed were reminiscent to those of Ethel Hallows' own attitude. Her persona of being a stuck up, haughty, spoilt brat was a facade.

Romana wasn't really concerned although Ethel had the capacity to do a lot worse than what the novices she had had to put up with when she had been at the Time Academy back home.

And yet…

More than once the Time Lady had heard, especially since many of the first year girls remembered Agatha and what she had tried to do on Selection Day, rumours of how Ethel was going to become another Agatha because of the code. Romana wasn't entirely sure if that was true since she was still not one hundred per cent certain about the magical world and its customs to get a better idea of what could happen.

But she didn't want that.

It would kill Esmerelda, and while Romana hadn't spent that much time with the older human, she liked her and she didn't want to even consider what losing her sister to nothing but anger and contempt would do to her. It wasn't fair on Esmerelda and the Time Lady knew it.

"Ro-Romana?" Maud's voice broke through her thoughts, and Romana looked up, and she saw their expressions. With a mental kick, Romana realised that she had been silent for a while now, and Maud and Enid were looking at her strangely.

"Sometimes something that was important to you once no longer becomes important. As you two have grown up, didn't you have a book or a toy you once loved, but as you got older, moving down the years you lost interest in it. Regeneration is the same, and now its happened to me - again - I've just become tired of Cackles. It's happened to me in the past; back in my first life, you would have found me as a woman who was always interested in duty, obligation; while that part of my personality hasn't faded, as such, its become less important to me as I've regenerated and gone through my last few lives," Romana explained to try to make up for her silence, hoping that she had explained everything clearly to the two humans who had become better friends to her than some of the others she had known back at the Academy on Gallifrey (she would not think of what had happened with Sartia, now her brain had become significantly unstuck after spending a few hours recovering; just equating these two girls with that nasty bitch who had tried to kill and then later manipulated her into getting into the Doctor's TARDIS to further screw the timeline up as all of those parallel timelines had threatened reality was enough to make the Time Lady ill), since they were her reasons.

Then again, the fact she now no longer liked Cackles factored. The petty bigotry of Miss Hardbroom was another factor in her decision, but it was a petty and childish reason in her mind, though it didn't take precedence in her mind.

"So what will you do now, try to find your planet?" Maud asked.

"Yes. Back to the TARDIS, get back out there," Romana replied, keeping her voice casual so then neither of her two human friends, at least that was how she saw them, could hear that she wasn't looking forward to the prospect of travelling all over the universe, staying in one time period after another trying to find Gallifrey. "Have a few adventures," she added, wondering just what was out there waiting for her. "And just…just live my lives," she added, her mind melancholy as she realised that even with the loss of her previous life which had joined her other incarnations in her mind, she still had plenty of life left to her yet.

Romana opened the door to her bedroom and she walked over to the desk and she started packing up the things she had brought with her from the flat she had bought, and she made a mental note to sell the place at the earliest opportunity. Maud and Enid stayed by the door, watching as the Time Lady took down the sketches and placed them on a neat pile on the bed.

"You're taking the artwork?" Enid asked, struggling after a few moments to find something to speak about.

Romana lifted her head, while she picked up Tabby and put him on her shoulder where the cat them batted her hair. "Yes, it's ironic, really; a couple of regenerations ago I never really had much time for art, especially during a visit to Paris where I saw the Mona Lisa - famous painting," she explained briefly when she saw the confusion written on her friends' faces, "only to discover it was part of a time-travelling alien's scheme to change history so the human race would never have existed."

Romana smiled softly as she remembered those lovely, albeit, brief days she and the Doctor had spent in Paris during the early days of her second incarnation before the encounter with Duggan, Scaroth, and that mystery surrounding the six Mona Lisa's spoilt everything. She shook her head, especially when the temptation to visit Paris returned to her mind.

It would be so easy.

Just go to the TARDIS, slip back in time to the days where her second incarnation and the Doctor had raced to stop Scaroth from going back in time to save the rest of the Jaggoroth and changing history so completely all life on Earth would never have evolved in the first place.

No, it was just too dangerous. Even if her TARDIS was a Type 70 and wasn't the same TARDIS favoured by the Doctor, and the security protocols wouldn't necessarily kick in, but she couldn't risk the potential paradox even if she remembered where her second incarnation would be at certain times during that visit.

Still, it was compelling to journey back, maybe spend a few days in Paris before her second incarnation and the Doctor arrived after dealing with that mess on Skaro with the Daleks trying to retrieve Davros to help them solve that logical mess they'd gotten into with the Movellans and her second self's adjustments to her new personality…

Romana shook her head slightly and carried on with her packing. Watched by her friends, Romana made a neat pile on the bed of all her previous self's art things - it was ironic, really; her first two lives had never truly bothered much with art, especially at the academy, and yet as she had grown older in mind and younger in body, art had been a creative release for her, and it had helped her deal with the loneliness which had come with being the last known Time Lord in the universe. The thought alone was still depressing for her, still, she pushed on.

Once she was finished with the initial batch she picked up everything she had collected and walked to her TARDIS. "Doors," she said, and the TARDIS opened up.

"It's amazing how you do that," Enid commented.

"It's a bit creepy, almost magical," Maud corrected her friend.

Romana chuckled and she walked inside the TARDIS and deposited her things on the console. Maud and Enid followed, now used to the interior of the TARDIS.

"How big is this place?" Enid asked.

"It varies," Romana replied as she neatly arranged the stack on the controls without them touching anything. "It's often been stated that the interior of a TARDIS is as large as a planet, or near the size of a solar system, but I don't really know myself."

Suddenly Romana looked at the two girls, and both witches were surprised when they saw the nervous expression on the Time Lady's face. "Maud, Enid," she began, "I don't want us to lose our friendship, but I can't stay on Earth anymore… So how would you feel if I offered you trips in the TARDIS?"

Maud and Enid looked at each other, amazed. "Trips?" Maud echoed.

"In the TARDIS?"

Romana nodded, hoping they said yes.

"Where would we go?" Enid asked.

Romana shrugged. "Wherever you like," she replied, "We could go back in time, see the dinosaurs, we could travel forward into the future, see the first Martian colonies, or visit other worlds. The possibilities are nearly endless."

Maud and Enid looked at each other in excitement, while the Time Lady watched.

"I don't want to lose track of you guys," Romana told them, "friendship isn't easy to come by. What do you say?"

"They are not going with you."

Miss Hardbroom was slowly walking through the TARDIS doorway as though afraid her presence would cause lightning bolts to shoot down at her.

"That's their choice, not yours," Romana said to the witch.

* * *

Despite Miss Hardbroom's best efforts, Romana did go to the castle to pick up Maud and Enid. The witch tried to cast spells to stop the TARDIS materialising, but the ship was able to break through them easily. And as the two witches grew older, Romana took them over time and space, sometimes spending days and days away from Earth.

They weren't the only ones Romana offered a chance. Shortly after the Time Lady left Earth and Cackles, she went back and invited the Hallow sisters - Esmerelda and Ethel and Sybil, meaning a trip to Hallow Manor, onto trips.

It was hard for Ethel to accept the fact the girl whom she'd been rivals with had regenerated, but their travels together really opened up the middle sisters' mind. Esmerelda was just excited to be spending time with her sisters, even if the TARDIS took her by surprise. Sybil was the timidest of the sisters, so it took time for the younger sister to adjust to the travels, though they were quite brief.

Romana took the Hallow sisters separate from her friends. She had wondered for a while about what the best way to deal with Ethel was because the Time Lady could see that there was a lot of darkness in the girl, but she was hoping that a broader mind would help the girl adjust. And she was right, by taking Ethel with her sisters to see various places, even going back in time to see the Disney movies when they had first come out, Ethel began to accept the fact there was more to life than envy.

* * *

Author's Note - And we're done.

The Movellans were the androids some people say were created by the Daleks, and they fought a war against the Daleks who evenly matched them and their capabilities in battle. That trip to Paris is of course covered in 'City of Death,' where an alien from ancient times was splintered into fragments and scattered along Earth's timeline and was pushing humanity forward so he could change history.


End file.
